Not new, I continue to have faith that things will get better as long as we keep pointing out mistakes. I get disappointed a whole lot too, but...

This blogger does not get it. Big time.

Jailbreaking did not come about for bypassing security or stealing iPhones. It came about because Apple wouldn't sell their GSM-capable phones on vendors other than AT&T, which meant that they also could not be used outside the US, which is the only place the things were being sold. So some Russian hackers came up with a jailbreak, but it wasn't so they could run arbitrary applications, it was so they could run a single application to rewrite the SIM vendor check, disable the carrier lock, and use the damn things on GSM carriers other than AT&T. T-Mobile in the US is one such carrier, and AT&T had demanded, and got, the carrier lock in exchange for letting Apple demand infrastructure changes to AT&T's network for things like "Visual Voice Mail".

The vast majority of these iPhones were legally sold for the full price in the US; Apple put a limit on the number of iPhones you could buy, in order to thwart this thriving export business, because technically, the carrier networks are fairly fragile things, and the phones had not been certified to the carrier networks on which they were being used, or by the regional equivalent of the FCC -- hence they were called "gray market" iPhones in these countries.

The benefit to Apple turned out to be immense, since with tools available for writing *an app* for the unlocking, it was relatively easy to classdump the objC files, and use the other APIs -- and apps were born. Steve actually didn't *want* Apps on the iPhone: he was deathly afraid of building another Newton, and the Apps he gave you were the ones he thought you needed, and no more. He didn't even want there to be ringtones that he and Jon Ivy hadn't approved (a pain in the ass when there are a small number of ringtones, 11,000 employees, and about half of them ate lunch in Cafe Macs in a two hour window).

For six months, many engineers inside Apple, including myself, were jailbreaking our own phones, and using the hacker tools because there *was no* formal API or dev kit. I personally wrote an X Code plugin for making iPhone Apps using the hacker tools, and we passed it around internally at Apple.

A startup was going to make a business of selling an SDK for the iPhone -- Apple _bought them_, and *that's* where Apple got their formal SDK, which they then went through and cleaned up APIs, and partitioned the data you could access from one app to another.

Everything that people jailbreak the things for these days is to get around data partitioning or carrier usage restrictions, i.e. things like using the phone as a WiFi hotspot for a laptop, without paying additional fees or metered rates to the carriers for the greater laptop bandwidth usage capability, or to be able to do the carrier unlock to get around per-region carrier lock-in contracts that Apple had signed.

The bottom line is that Apple could have avoided almost of of the hacking that happened fairly early on by not putting the carrier lock in the baseband firmware, which was a dumbass design decision based on the Samsung baseband chip having the feature implemented already, and having it up in user space in the commcenter program instead.

And their device would be a lot less interesting, and Android might have followed that lead, and been a lot less interesting as well. And Apple wouldn't have made tons of money on Apps because there would be no AppStore.

But as long as there are carrier locks, and more or less absurd carrier restrictions on bandwidth for phones s. hotspots (yes, Sprint, I'm talking to you), there will be jailbreaking. This is a DRM issue, and if jailbreaking is the only way to bypass DRM, then jailbreaking will happen.

Bottom line philosophy lesson: There will always be people who say "These devices are made of atoms. I paid for these atoms. I own them. They will God Damn Well Do What I Tell Them To Do".

Exactly. Welcome to propaganda media 101. Yesterday, watching CNN people were given 1 opinion over and over with no facts. The opinion of course was that Snowden was a dangerous person needing to be imprisoned. No mention of the crimes he's revealed of course. I'm guessing other media this morning will follow suite, and provide a similar opinion without facts. What's really sad is that so many don't question our propaganda.. er media.. system.

They could, but then no one would buy the stuff they want to replace it with. This is likely a way for them to remonetize the existing VMS customer base, who isn't upgrading at this point because It Just Works(tm), and who isn't buying new hardware because It's Sufficient(tm).

This is the same problem Microsoft Windows XP are posing for Microsoft.

Me too!

Especially when they are peeing in a public restroom, and they get footage of themselves, and anyone else that happens to be there. I expect they will work in mirrors when the officer is washing their hands.

And with no way to turn it for lunch breaks, we can see when they take too long, or are technically off duty and make comments to other cops who are technically off duty.

Not in a continuous tradition, however.

The compact Macs had bare CRTs inside that would give you a nasty shock if you touched them wrong, and for a while, the power supplies were bare too. And the whole case required an unusually long torx screwdriver to open, in order to deter people from opening it.

The Mac II's were good, until the end, when the IIvx came along. It was a bit of a bitch to work with, and ushered in an age of Macs that were bitches to work with, most notably everything based upon the Quadra 840AV case. Adding RAM to some of those bastards required disassembling nearly everything. The mid 90s were a dark time for doing hardware upgrades or repairs on high end Mac desktops. The Blue and White G3 case was ugly, but other than the drive enclosure (a bit annoying IIRC) it was a real breath of fresh air.

With so much in such a small space/size and an unusual factor as well, I have a very bad feeling about your ability to upgrade practically any parts in this thing.

The good news: it's a very modular design, and it looks well-engineered.

The bad news: its parts are totally nonstandard, so you will only get the upgrades that Apple wants you to have, at the prices Apple wants to charge.

Of course, maybe some third party will figure out how to make the parts and sell them to you... If so, Apple will shut them down hard. It has happened before.

I'll give them this: that looks like it will set a new record for crazy powerful computing hardware in a small package, and I'll bet it will actually be quieter than older "wind tunnel" PowerMacs. But if I'm spending my own money, I don't want one.

I remember upgrading the RAM in my first machine in the 80's. I had to plug individual 16kB ICs into sockets, being careful not to fuck up the easily fuck-upable pins, not to put them in the wrong way, etc. The stuff we have now... it's great, but man does it make me feel old.

Yeah, well... trying to get some people to the whooshing noise was the point is a lost cause.

Bingo. Gold star for this guy. Unlike the previous poster, who was last seen riding the short bus. -_-