The other hack was the jail break. I jail breaked my phone so I could play with the third party applications that Apple was too stupid not to include in their software base. A jail break allows access to the iPhone file system, nothing more nothing less, but once open you can upload the installer.app with lets you install cool software, add your own ringtones, and wallpapers. My wife followed suite jail breaking her phone, but today she updated and has lost all the applications and cannot access the file system. I told her, "do not update the phone!" What did she get in return for not heeding my warning? iTunes store we cannot use unless we find WiFi at a local coffee shop and the typical cross scripting patch every browser on every operating system in the world gets when it's new. Oh boy!

I left my phone intact. I may pay for that decision later by being totally outdated and likely never being able to safely update when cool software actually get released by Apple or more likely the jail break will magically work again shortly allowing me to apply the security patch then jail breaking my phone again. We will see, but I am betting on the latter.

My thought on Apple doing this is Apple is a pretender. They treat their user base as if they are a bunch of morons, while pretending they support the whole open source world and techie people. They do not! Well, if you spend more on a G5 they kind of treat you like a techie...

Apple is considered innovative and this allows them their over priced sales, but are they really? Let's see, the modern company is very sneaky business wise and their products very pretty I agree, but I don't see innovative anywhere. Their operating system is BSD Unix , which is a free and open source Unix operating system.They made a window manager that sits on top of BSD that doesn't even have the best features found in Linux/Unix and they crippled the control over windows in general for a stupid corner control that lets me resize the window, oh boy. Christ, you can't even theme it! Here is a window manager if you want pretty + power!

I guess in the next big OS X they will give you multiple desktops, but that is the oldest feature in BSD/Linux so once again, not innovative. How about desktop widgets? They lock you out of your desktop to use them so why would you not continue to use Konfabulator, currently known asYahoo widgets ? Amazingly, these have been around since the first OS X release, before Apple's desktop widgets ever existed.

Now that Macs run Intel chips Apple literally charges you more for the same shit us non-Apple users have been buying for years. How about their warranty? My father bought an iMac. The drive died recently, he had the machine for two years and luckily got the extended warranty! So the Mac was at the shop for a month. Yes, a fucking month for a stupid hard drive! When he got it back the receipt with the charges, without labor, read over $500.00 without the warranty. I replaced the hard drive in my wife's old iMac, which took me ten minutes and cost me $60.00. I put a 7200 rpm drive in our iMac and it made the damned thing actually useful so my poor dad most likely got the same crap he got in the original iMac, a 5400 rpm drive. Of course he left data on the old drive, which still worked good enough I could pull data off of it. He calls and asked if he can get the old drive back. They tell him no, the drive must be sent to Apple. What? If I take a gold ring to the jeweler and have it sized down I tell them to give me the gold - that is my property! I paid for that property! Like I said, as long as the warranty is in effect, you are leasing the equipement even though you paid for it and the warranty.

Honestly, what was Apple's thinking when it came to the iPhone? Four to Eight gigs and I cannot put personal files on it. One computer and iTunes to sync? Why would you not allow me to use the iPhone as a flash drive? I should be able to plug it in at work, copy files, plug it in at home and dump them. Do they think big corporate employers will let employees install iTunes? Hell, people are already asking why Apple would shut out the whole corporate market...

Oh well, enough bitching about who Apple is, lets get back to iPhones. The trend today is any and everthing a corporation sells you is never your property. If I sell you music, video, and now hardware it never belongs to you. For three hundred or more dollars you are authorized to use the iPhone, nothing more nothing less. You are renting it for a period of two years and like an apartment you cannot just rip out walls and make the place yours. This is how Apple has always been and if you decide to break the rules your very expensive warranty will be void and at that point you finally own the hardware, which you may not be able to fix yourself.

Steve Jobs would be wise to allow third party developers access to the iPhone API and file system, we all agree. I say iPhone owners should have access to their file system no matter what! Eight gigs is a lot of space to lock down only for iTunes music sales. But, then again I always thought he should have made a 3-D desktop and created an open source software repository with a desktop installer/updater for OS X similar to how Debian Linux works, but no, like I said, not innovative or supportive of open source, just another leased apartment in a fancy neighborhood that will be a slum in a few years.

I will tell you, I will leave my iPhone not updated if I need to, but I am buying one of these or something similar in the next two years. This is the phone I wanted to begin with, but was impatient. You can't spend your life always waiting for the latest and greatest to come out or you will die holding a 900mhz headset from 1995...