Apple dislikes jailbreaking for a number of reasons…let us count the ways

Apple doesn’t want people jailbreaking.  Not even a little bit it.  If you don’t mind reading through 45 pages of legalese, you’ll see why.  It really boils down to these 13 reasons:

1. Crashes & instability
2. Malfunctioning & safety
3. Invasion of privacy
4. Exposing children to age-inappropriate content
5. Viruses & malware 
6. Inability to update software
7. Cellular network impact 
8. Piracy of developers’ applications 
9. Instability of developers’ applications 
10. Increased support burden 
11. Developer relationships
12. The Apple/iPhone brand 
13. Limitation on ability to innovate

All of these seem like legitimate reasons for keeping out jailbreakers until you consider that iPhones are computers.  If Apple wins this arguement, why wouldn’t computer makers be able to dictate what is put on a 3G enabled notebook?  Could you modify the EFI/BIOS on a laptop?  What’s the difference?

Wired took a particularly hard look at the cell tower’s danger:

The EFF has asked the regulators for the DMCA exemption, (.pdf) which would allow consumers to run any app on the phone, including those not authorized by Apple.

Fred von Lohmann, the EFF attorney who made the request, said Apple’s latest claims are preposterous. During a May public hearing on the issue in Palo Alto, California, he told regulators there were as many as a million unauthorized, jailbroken phones.

In an interview Tuesday, he said he suspected those phones have not been used to destroy mobile phone towers. “As far as I know, nothing like that has ever happened,” he said.

He added that, if Apple’s argument was correct, the open-source Android phone from Google on T-Mobile networks would also be a menace to society. ”This kind of theoretical threat,” von Lohmann said, “is more FUD than truth.”

Apple also claimed that jailbreaking would pave the way for hackers to alter the Exclusive Chip Identification number that identified the phone to the cell tower, which could enable calls to be made anonymously. Apple said “this would be desirable to drug dealers.”