Nik Rawlinson
Legalising iPhone jailbreaking will put Apple off locking down Mac OS X.
So now it’s legal to jailbreak your iPhone, in the US at least, but why would you want to? Well, for starters, there’s the thrill of being somewhat subversive, bucking the trend and hitting back against the authority that is Apple’s approval process, and I can see what anyone who takes that line is trying to achieve.
For some people, the very presence of that kind of control – where faceless app approvers (or rejecters) can determine what we run on our phones – is simply a force that absolutely must be fought. On principle. For me, though, I like the convenience of getting all of my apps from one online store, and knowing that, by and large, they won’t cause me any problems.
I suspect, though, that I’m missing the bigger picture. It’s not the very act of jailbreaking that’s important, but the legal clout backing you up. Why? Because there’s every chance that the locked-down iPhone is just the tip of a very fat wedge.
What’s to say that in the face of its apparent success, Apple won’t roll out this model to the Mac itself? The App Store has shifted more than 5 billion apps in less than two years and paid out $1 billion to developers. How much more could it do if the only way to buy software for the Mac was to buy it in a similar way? What if a non-jailbroken Mac OS X 10.7 or later would only install software that Apple has personally tested and approved?
It would be an easy sell for some consumers. The Mac is already a stable platform and software written for Mac OS X does generally ‘just work’. It’s largely malware free, too, which is vital in a business environment. Having Apple personally approve every application would shore up any last chinks, and as a bonus provide the company with a great sales pitch for first-time computer buyers: pick a Mac over a PC and you can be sure – absolutely sure – that it will run trouble-free.
For the rest of us, however, it would be an unmitigated disaster. Flash might have the same prominence on desktop Macs as it does on the iPhone: none. Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Office: all big applications that would inevitably be delayed as Apple pored over the source code to make sure they didn’t trip up on the Mac. And what of those products that competed with an Apple alternative: Office versus iWork, Lightroom versus Aperture?
It’s theoretical, it won’t happen soon and it may not happen at all, but such possible outcomes are the reason why, while I won’t be jailbreaking my iPhone, I applaud those who have fought for the right to do so.
