I agree with the above comments....Apple should be careful they don't alienate their customers who remain loyal to them. I have several Apple products (Powerbook, Ipods,etc) which are great (although expensive) and if they mess around with software deliberayely trying to sabotage phones then they will lose more customers and build a bad reputation. Frankly, locking into single phone companies (AT&T and O2) is wrong....although very lucrative for their business I suspect!

Lee, London,

Apple screw this one up in a big way. My first Apple is an Apple II Plus which was purchased in the early 80's. I had a huge amount of respect and good will toward this iconic company, but their rapacious, greedy attempts to establish a monopoly and to bully me into becoming a fenced-in sheep have squandered all of it. I have made up my mind - this is my last Apple product, end of discussion. For future purchases I will not even consider or look at the Apple brand. I am in the market for a new laptop, which I will purchase in a couple of weeks, and I am not even peeking at the Apple website.

Apple iDone, Redmond , WA

"Apple stressed that it was not setting out deliberately to counteract the effects of such programs with its updates but at a recent event in London, the company's chief executive, Steve Jobs, suggested he was not concerned about the impact of unlocking programs. ".... am I the only one who this sentence doesn't make sense to?

Evan, San Francisco, CA

Apple should be very careful with this. The company has a lot of good will with customers that is as good as gold. If they start intentionally ruining peoples expensive phones they may find this good will depleted rather quickly.

Susceptor, San Diego , CA

If the phone becomes unrepairable from simple changing networks maybe they should do a recall on the phones and fix them. I thought that teenager in the news a few weeks back found a way to fix the phones so they could be used on different networks. After this many years of companies providing phones I am sure they can make them so they are repairable.

Jim Reynolds, Salt Lake City, UT

The next gen phones you won't be able to do this ponzy scheme your running Apple so don't get use to the "free" money your getting from providers.

Thanks to the Feds we won't be held hostage to any network because we want a particular phone. On a side note, Apples inability to support push email makes it much like its computers useless to serious business applications.

Bob, Redmond, US, Wash

I am just curious what it is that software can do to destroy the hardware of an IPhone to such a degree that would render the hardware permanently inoperable. I am pretty sure my computer has more hardware then an IPhone yet no one has ever suggested that any software or software upgrade could render my system to a state of "permanent inability"

Is it possible rather that Apple simply does not want to deal with a flood of returns of their product to have the software wiped and reinstalled at a factory level?

Herbert Moosecox, Las Vegas, USA

Apple should have made the iPhone multi platform ready. Unfortunately, I have a sprint service who's phones only work on their network. Apple missed yet another opportunity to garner a lager share of the mobile communications a market – seems to be an Apple trait. Apple is also missing the opportunity to capture a larger share of the computer market by bringing it's laptop PC prices in line with the likes of Dell, HP, Sony etc.. Just think of the large number of units it would sell bringing the general public in the Apple world of computing.

Ron, Phoenix, AZ

Apple does have a lot of goodwill, but it's goodwill for no good reason. Apple is seen as some godlike entity which exist purely combat the evil empire of Microsoft. In fact, it is a business entity, and it's SOLE reason for being is to make maximum profits for it's shareholders.

Apple has an exclusive agreement with AT&T, and it doubtless has contractual obligations to defend that exclusivity. Did the hacks 'damage the software' so that poor Apple will brick the phone with an update? Who knows? Will Apple attempt to combat the hacks to defend AT&T? 100% certain.

Mark, Someplace, Canada