Apple Strike Back: “We Will Brick Unlocked Phones”

As a way of showing their appreciation and affection for all those companies that offer to unlock your Apple iPhone to any network, Steve Jobs has shown a potential threat to their businesses. Now that wasn’t very nice of you Steve, was it?

iPhoneSIMfree’s great way to unlock is available for about $50 in the States and roughly £40 in the UK, while the iPhone Dev Team’s step-by-step free guide is getting more and more popular.

Ars Technica seem to have quite a reliable mole regarding the Bricking business and is suggesting that rather than just make the phones re-locked, Apple are taking it that one step further and planning to “brick” unlocked iPhones as a lesson to hackers.

“We have reason to believe that Apple may go much further than just ‘breaking’ the SIM unlocks that have been released so far. One move that the cat (or is Apple the mouse?) could make in this game would be to permanently and irreparably brick unlocked iPhones when they run this month’s pending software update.”

Do you think this can work? After all, the PSP bricking from Sony hasn’t been too successful and hackers continue to free the way for us homebrew users.

Will Apple be able to stop hackers from playing with the Jesus phone? What do you think?