Steve Jobs: Shepherd of Sheeple

I am sure by now you are all familiar with the Apple iPhone and its sales record of around 1 million handsets. You are also aware that AT&T was to be the sole network for the iPhone and that the contract that was signed between Apple and AT&T certainly wasn’t in the financial best interests of AT&T. They took quite a hit in regards to the normal operating procedure for wireless providers, allowing Apple to make all the rules and allowing them to track and sell directly to AT&T’s customers. AT&T gladly said yes to the contract because they knew that the Apple sheeple would clamor to the iPhone as quickly as Steve Jobs fires employees.

Now comes some interesting news about the unlocking of the iPhone. When you buy a cell phone it comes locked into a certain carrier’s network. However, by law, the carrier must unlock the phone if requested by the consumer to facilitate things like overseas travel where the carrier is not available. This rarely happens because people don’t know that it’s possible and carriers do their best to keep it that way. Another reason is that most carriers run on different frequencies. So in the US, only T-Mobile and AT&T use the GSM network so an unlocked phone from AT&T only benefits T-Mobile customers and vice versa. Here’s the catch; AT&T paid a lot of money to be the sole provider of the iPhone but it behooves Apple to get as many potential customers as possible.

Apple has said that unlocking the iPhone is nearly impossible due to the configuration of the chips and the sim card. It took less than 3 months for a group of hackers to figure out how to do it, write the code, and wrap it in an application. They were primed to sell it weeks ago but got some friendly phone calls from Apple’s lawyers that delayed the release of their program. Then a week after they announced it would be for sale and began distributing copies for $99. This is where things start to smell like a 2 day old diaper. Days later, after getting their hands on the unlock program, a group of developers rewrote the coding, as not to “Steal” the original, and began giving it away for free.

Strange to me that in all of this the only people that won were in the Apple camp. AT&T is now screwed because to activate an iPhone, you can do it through iTunes, unlock it, and use your current sim card from another provider. The guys who created the original software got very little before this group of developers stole it and began giving it away. The key is that those Apple lawyers were probably able to convince them it was illegal to patent their software thus opening up a freeware version of it once it was released. So the big winner is Apple who now has dramatically increased their customer base by sitting around saying “We locked it up the best we could.” Did Apple purposely make the unlock process much easier than it led AT&T to believe? Did Apple strong arm the original developers so that others could write the software while Apple looked the other way? As of now there are more questions than answers.