My iPhone 1.1.1 Update
My iPhone is not unlocked, but I had installed Installer.app and a couple applications, though the only ones I was using with any regularity were iFlickr and Erica Sadun’s SendPics. I installed it last night, after making sure to sync up first. Partway into the “Preparing iPhone” progress bar, the phone went dark and then popped up the yellow triangle/”Please connect to iTunes” screen, which I took as a sign that things were not going well. A few minutes later I got a -1005 (iirc) error message from iTunes. Even with a backup, I still always get that frisson of fear when something like that happens.
Fortunately, at that point I just restored. I lost some photos that I hadn’t imported – somehow I had gotten the dumb idea that photos were imported without pressing the damn import button- but otherwise I’m back to normal, if less my iToner ringtones and Installer.app.
The iTunes WiFi music store is pretty cool. You could easily drop a lot of impulse money on it. Not that I have, of course; I just bought a couple things in the interests of investigating the interface. The store gives Apple a little bit of an edge in this market again; right now, you can’t buy from Amazon MP3 on your iPhone or iPod Touch. If I were Amazon, I’d be figuring out a way to do that.
Technorati Tags: apple, installer.app, iphone
I’m glad to read you didn’t have any more trouble than that.
I’m also curious about what Brick Friday will mean going forward.
I was not an “Apple user” prior to OS X: I had a G3 all-in-one running OS9 imposed on me when I worked for a school district, but it was purely to manage a single piece of software that had no Windows client. I was indifferent to it. So my historic sense of Apple is largely confined to that of all the latecomers Gruber so despises: I didn’t bother having a Mac in my house until I swapped an old Celeron box for someone’s Beige G3 so I could try out OS X, ca. early 2002.
Anyhow, my sense of Apple has been one of a company that’s largely indifferent to the third party world, occasionally making life hard for people, but never in a manner that did anything worse than momentarily break a workaround or hack. That’s what XPostFacto seems to be all about — working around Uncle Steve, periodically adapting to a new change, moving on.
It’s hard not to read a certain affrontive indifference in the way the company handled this update. How many unlocking hacks are there? How hard would it be to restore the unit’s firmware to a like-new state then do the update? I’m not exactly sympathetic with the people who unlocked their phones, heard Apple’s warning, decided they knew better and now own bricks, but I don’t get Apple’s tone on this one.
Maybe this was an exercise in creating a perception that iPhones aren’t safe to hack … using the early adopters as an object lesson for the much larger potential customer base?
What do you think?
I’ve been a little surprised at their tone as well. What I think might be going on is the exclusivity deal with AT&T may be forcing them to be a tad more ham-handed than they normally would, but still, I’m not sure I get it either. You’d think you’d want vibrant third-party developers. On the other hand, their stand *has* been pretty consistent, ever since WWDC – you can develop Web apps for Mobile Safari, and that’s all they’re promising. I would hope they mean for the moment.
Maybe they have so many transformative changes planned for the software that they aren’t yet ready to open the phone up. Maybe we’re 3 or 4 updates away from what Apple really means by the iPhone. Again, I have no idea, just speculating.
As for latecomers, I started using a girlfriend’s Mac Plus in 1987 and was hooked. I bled six till about the early 90’s or so, when I started getting seriously interested in programming. Mac development in those days was just insanely complex, and the amount of water hauled just to get a window on the screen that said “Hello, world” seemed like far more work than just typing printf and have done with it. So over the years I’ve been a Mac fanboy while being annoyed at the truly hardcore; for years Macworld was completely useless to anyone who wasn’t a graphic designer, “for the rest of us” be damned.
I get a weird sense off them with this one too, but I’m not sure what the motivation is. As I said, it smells like AT&T a little, but still not sure. It could be that when it comes to non-computer consumer devices, they’re much more protective of the user experience and see third-party hacks as a threat. I dunno. I’m pretty vague here, but you’re right – it *is* puzzling.