Yesterday, amid much hullabaloo and inflated expectation, Apple introduced the second generation iPhone or ‘iPhone 3G.’ Announced yesterday, it’ll be available July 11th. There’s a bunch of incremental improvements (Battery life, faster wireless, GPS, nicer shape, metal buttons) and some extraordinarily clever RF engineering (ten wireless bands on just 2 antennas - brilliant!), but the basic unit doesn’t change much. Much to my surprise, the software (iPhone 2.0) will also be free for generation-1 units such as mine. Previously, in iPods, new features were never released for older hardware, so this is a delightful change.
Nevertheless, as it stands now I won’t be getting one. And it’s a toddle that a lot of other geeks won’t be, either. Here’s why: The first-gen iPhones introduced the idea of ‘activation at home.’ Instead of sitting at a desk with some clerk, forking over credit card, SSN and driver’s license, you simply bought the iPhone and walked away. Once at home, you plug the phone into your computer, on your own time, and ran the streamlined activation via iTunes. As a way to reduce consumer frustration and humiliation, it was brilliant, and had the side benefit of helping stores too - you didn’t need activation staff, counter space, etc, and you could sell more phones in less time. Huzzahs all around.
(One of the main reasons this worked was the revenue model - the phone were expensive (started at $600) and AT&T had a monthly kickback to Apple based on subscriber revenue.)
The downside of this became evident later, as literally thousands of geeks bent their efforts to unlocking the iPhone for use on other networks, or simply to write and run their own programs. Since you didn’t have to activate in-store, or make any sort of promise, it was much easier to do and many (yours truly included) did just that.
Now, however, they’ve changed the revenue model to copy other cell phones: The phones are subsidized down to $200/$300, with AT&T footing part of the bill. The elephant in the room is that you now have to activate before you leave the store. Think long lines, annoying idiot salespeople, and a required new 2 year contract with a minimum monthly cost of $70/month. (Your bill will be higher, due to taxes and such.)
Because of this, you can’t order one online any more, and anyone wanting to hack their phone faces the breach of contract fee from AT&T, which is probably at least $200. This is really going to put the hurt on iPhone hacking, which they probably accepted as an ancillary cost to reducing the numbers of unlocked iPhones in the wild. I wonder how they accounted for the customer backlash of in-store activation?
Tech companies such as Apple regularly ignore propellerheads such as myself for the very $imple rea$on of money: Though vocal, we’re just not that large of a market, and stuff that makes us happy doesn’t necessarily translate to mass sales. Therefore, those of us who wanted to upgrade and use it on, say, T-Mobile, are acceptable collateral damage. I do suspect that they’ve underestimated how peevish people are going to be at the bad old activation hassle, though. Fingers crossed for the resumption of sanity, because there’s one thing that I’m completely certain of: The iPhone 3G will get hacked anyway. People like this will make it happen, so why play King Canute?
(In the meantime, I’ll probably buy a 16G gen-one unit and give/sell my 8G to a relative that wants one.)
One of the recurring gotchas with an unlocked iPhone is that the newer features re-lock the phone every time. Because of that, I’ve kept mine at version 1.0.2, which works pretty well but lacks some newer niceties. The 
