Apple Bricks Unlocked iPhones. LOL @ Fanboys.

As always, Steve Jobs doesn’t like you fiddling with your (his?) stuff. With its latest iPhone update (1.1.1), Apple makes good on its threat to brick SIM-unlocked iPhones. Upon restart after the update, SIM-unlocked iPhone users are greeted with this message: “Insert an unlocked and valid SIM to activate iPhone.” Even reinserting the AT&T SIM card doesn’t revive the phone. Even if you didn’t SIM-unlock the phone, all third-party apps are wiped out.

As much as I love the iPhone’s browser (now replicable on many other phones through Opera Mini), I am so glad I didn’t buy one of these overpriced overhyped locked-down GPRS bricks. People who unlocked their iPhones are probably the same tech-savvy peer reviewers who lined up on launch day to overpay $600 for them. Watch their collective compounded rage explode in the next few hours. I can’t wait to hear John C. Dvorak chide Leo Laporte on this in the next TWiT. Let’s hear the oh-so-charismatic Steve Jobs talk his way out of this one.

Yes, fanboys, Apple is no longer that pair of hippies named Steve who got their start cracking AT&T. They’re now a wannabe monopoly brutally protecting their cut of AT&T iPhone service fees — and they’re not above screwing over the Cult of the Mac to do it. The iPhone just went from the sexiest gadget ever to the next Newton — in under three months.

As for me, I’ll just sit back, laugh out loud as I read all the betrayed fanboys’ angry blog posts in the wonderfully cross-platform Opera Mini, and wait for the blissfully open OEM Gphone.

(Image via Miles Evans.)