Apple's created a terrific new device, touting it's fantastic open Internet capabilities, and then have locked it down to an absurd degree.
It's bad enough that the official way of putting ringtones on the phone is to take a subset of your already-purchased iTunes music and pay $0.99 for a ringtone sample to be created.
It's worse that the only developer API that's exposed officially is nothing more than a pretty plain-vanilla browser.
There's OS X buried under that, and all sorts of developers have been figuring out how to write apps that take advantage of all that power ... who are building the ecosystem that makes the phone more valuable, and what's Apple doing? Telling them their apps may stop working at any point.
And what about the consumers who've shelled out $500 for their shiny new iPhone? Well, if they happen to want to use another network, or install native apps (whicn involves hacking the device), they lose their warranty. Actually, they might even end up bricking their phone.
Now, on the one hand, Apple's got a point: They built the phone, and the operating system. If someone wants to hack what it is that they've built, it's certainly not Apple's responsibility to make sure any future update won't conflict with the hack.
On the other hand, going from a world where the carrier controls the complete user experience isn't much worse than a world where your hardware vendor controls the complete user experience.
The iPhone came out quickly, shook the Motorola's and Nokia's of the world pretty fiercely, and excited developers... all of that is good. It's probably fair to guess that they just haven't had the time to open things up for developers cleanly yet. I'd even bet that Apple are going to release extensions to XCode to let developers build rich native iPhone apps in the not-too-distant future...
But at the moment, they're just scaring their customers, and irritating the developers that are the ones that'll really add value to iPhone going forward.
