Steve Jobs Picks a Fight With iPhone Unlockers
Until yesterday, Apple (AAPL) had kept mum about attempts by various
third-party programmers to free the iPhone from the binds that tie it
to a particular carrier — AT&T (T) in the U.S. and now O2 in the
U.K. and T-Mobile in Germany. As recently as last week Apple responded to questions about the
release of iUnlock with a terse “no comment.”
But when asked a direct question at the “Mum is no longer the word”
press conference in London yesterday, Steve Jobs couldn’t remain silent
– especially in front of Matthew Key, CEO of O2 UK, which by all
accounts has paid a pretty penny to be the iPhone’s sole provider in
Britain. Jobs responded to the question “Is unlocking a concern?” as
follows:
“It’s a constant cat and mouse game — we have the same thing with the
iPod with music.” Steve looks at Matthew, “Are we the cat or mouse? We have to stay one step ahead of them.” (quote from Engadget’s live blog)
The analogy to music is a curious one, given that Jobs has argued
forcefully against DRM (digital rights management) schemes that make it
hard to copy digital music files — despite the fact that Apple uses them in iTunes. This may explain his professed
confusion about whether Apple is the cat or the mouse in this new game.
Should unlocked
iPhones proliferate much beyond the hacker community,
Apple would be less at risk than the cellphone carriers. Apple
gets paid for its hardware in any event, whereas user fees are the
carrier’s main source of iPhone revenue.
Apple has not yet deployed its most powerful tool for combating unlock programs:
firmware updates for the iPhone so far have disrupted some third-party apps, but haven’t touched the unlock solutions. That will almost
certainly change, and when it does the cat-and-mouse game Jobs
describes will begin in earnest.
Meanwhile, as Gregg Keizer points out today in Computerworld,
Apple and O2 have found other means of encouraging British customers to
stick with authorized iPhone dealers and carriers. The flat-rate plans
(with unlimited data transfers) that O2 announced yesterday are a
pretty sweet deal in the Europe smartphone market, where pay-as-you-go
is the norm. An even better sweetener may be the free account British iPhone customers will get with The Cloud, which has blanketed London’s financial district with Wi-Fi and
boasts some 7,500 hot spots in Great Britain and Ireland.
Given that only 30% of the U.K. is covered by O2’s EDGE network, iPhone
access to those hotspots could turn out to be key.
[Photo courtesy of Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images via the New York Times]
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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