My phone being bricked

Apple is very red-faced. Despite its best efforts to lock the iPhone customers to AAPT and lockdown the phone to only "trusted" applications, the hackers have written programs that allow third-party applications to be installed AND for the phones to be unlocked from the AAPT network. Not surprising considering the iPhone uses OS X as its operating system.

So, in the new iPhone firmware upgrade, Apple has designed it to "brick" any modified iPhones. Yes: If you add capabilities to your iPhone, and then try to upgrade the phone's official firmware, your phone gets stuck on the "Activate" screen and becomes USELESS.

But I don't need to worry about it. I'm not one of the zusbuns who just *had* to buy an overpriced, over-restrictive phone from a company that has a history of hating expandability and of supporting DRM.

I mean, fucking hell. People are purposely not upgrading to the new firmware, because they prefer their iPhone to have the capabilities that third-party developers have given them than to have the tiny new features that Apple is offering. If that's not a sign that the iPhone is a failure as a product, then I don't know what is.