I completely sympathize with Mark. I was an Apple hater for years, and was ecstatic when I discovered Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) and could move away from Windows as well.

Then a good friend of mine convinced me to get an iPhone. I was hesitant at first, but after trying one I decided to go for it.

Then I got a job where my choices were a MacBook Pro or a Dell with Vista. Three guesses which one I took (the first two don't count).

I must admit OS X is really nice, and full Unix compatibility is a huge plus. Still... sigh

[Edit: missing period]

Full unix compatibility without easy, comprehensive & working BINARY package management (like debian, or archlinux) is still a big pain in the ass. Setting up something like the mysqldb library, mod_python, apache, and django can be a 1 hour production vs. the 5 minute production that it is on linux.

Agreed, package managers are a godsend. That's why there's http://www.macports.org/ and http://www.finkproject.org/

I can't modify the firmware image in my Bosch engine ECU, even though doing so could significantly improve the performance of my car. Mark is right. Nobody gives a shit.

iPhone owners who do care about Freedom 0 will just jailbreak the thing though.

... and Apple will do whatever they can to brick those phones, and in the arms race that follows, it's a coin flip as to whether Apple will win (like DirecTV did) or lose (like Microsoft did with the first Xbox).

I don't think Apple is as pressed to fight this war as DirecTV was.

Also you can jailbreak the thing without additional hardware which wasn't possible in the DirecTV scenario. I doubt that we'll see jailbroken iphones going away anytime soon, the process is becoming effortless even for non-hacker types and the benefits are obvious (even if you've never heard of Freedom 0).

I don't know if Apple feels pressed. It's hard to say if, long term, you'll need hardware to jailbreak an iPod. I'm just pointing out that there is a bit of hubris in the jailbreaker mentality --- it is not, from a CS perspective, an unsolveable problem to make jailbreaking more effort than it's worth. Apple's got a lot of smart people.