How Apple “Bricked” the iPhone

Much has been written about why Apple (AAPL) issued software update 1.1.1, which wreaked havoc with untold numbers of iPhones, but not much about how they did it.

It’s not an easy riddle to untangle. The update seems to have affected different iPhones in different ways. Although there are plenty of stories about unlocked phones being “bricked” by the update, there are anecdotal reports of unlocked phones that worked just fine under 1.1.1 — albeit only with AT&T’s (T) service, not T-Mobile’s or any other carrier’s. Some phones modified by third-party software were also broken by the update; others lost their unapproved applications but were otherwise unaffected. Even some virgin, unmodified phones were rendered inoperable, for reasons that remain mysterious.

As Erica Sadun of The Unofficial Apple Weblog (tuaw.com) puts it: “the transition from working iPhone to brick seems to be a completely random process.”