The iPhone unlocked – clever hacking or master business strategy?

Apple announced a couple of days ago that they had sold their 1st million iPhone. Just a few days later, it’s been announced today that the iPhone has finally been cracked and can be used with any SIM. The crack requires that the iPhone is also iBricked, which means people are able to install their own apps on an otherwise closed platform.

Apple seem uncharacteristically comfortable about it. When designers started trying to clone their OSX dock UI on Windows they pulled no legal punches and got a few projects shut down. I do run a dock on my Vista machine -instead of Vista’s sidebar, which is poorly implemented and mostly useless- but not thanks to Apple. Not at all.

This time around they have made no noise so far. Attempts to crack the iPhone have been constant, and constantly publicised, since the day the gadget was announced. iBrick and other methods to install 3rd party software are freely available, as is DVD Jon’s activation servers, the first unlock solution which enabled people to use the WiFi interface on a not activated iPhone. One would suspect an answer is coming, possibly in the form of a software update, possibly in the form of an updated device for Europe with the holes patched up. But their strategy might well be a completely different one: they may well see the efforts at unlocking the phone as a good thing, removing operator ties that limit their distribution, turning the phone into a truly universal option, maximising their reach. Apple are said to be making 10{acc93bc4c50d705b6582df8463c6e78eab363e734bea58beb26f7f541e3e6037} of the European operators’ revenues. But they make 100{acc93bc4c50d705b6582df8463c6e78eab363e734bea58beb26f7f541e3e6037} of the device manufacturer’s ones. Maybe the community are being allowed to do what they want, to get the product they’d really like to have, to buy it in droves regardless of where they may live and to keep adding to Apple’s ever growing coffers. That would be a novel strategy, the last nail in the coffin of the operator, a beautiful form of poison pill. Imagine this was their plan all along?