Apple’s iPhone has been around for more than a decade, but these still are many interesting untold (or less known) stories about it. And one of them concerns the first-ever carrier-unlocked unit.
Back in 2007, Apple launched the iPhone as an AT&T-exclusive, so unless they were customers of this particular carrier, buyers in the United States just couldn’t purchase the new phone model.
Unlocking the first iPhones was quite a challenge, especially because the technology was new and Apple itself tried to make this thing as hard as possible. But George Hotz, also known as GeoHot, managed to do it quite fast in August 2007 when he was only 17 years old.
He bypassed Apple’s restrictions and unlocked the original iPhone to work in other networks besides AT&T, eventually generating a huge buzz in the technology world, again because everyone was looking into ways to do it. The hardware-based unlocking method involved disassembling the device, so it wasn’t the easiest thing to do for the faint of heart.
This rather complex technique to unlock the iPhone opened the door for more methods, with another hacking group eventually managing one month later to do the same thing using a software-based system that did not require any tweaks under the hood of the device.
But because Hotz was the first one to unlock an iPhone, his method gained quite a lot of exposure in 2007, eventually catching the attention of Terry Daidone, the founder of Certicell, who wanted such a device all for himself. Daidone contacted Hotz and asked for an unlocked iPhone, making an offer that the hacker really couldn’t refuse.
The 17-year-old skilled developer decided to trade in his second unlocked iPhone for a Nissan 350Z and no less than three other iPhones that were locked to AT&T.
Needless to say, being the first one in the world to unlock an iPhone brought Hotz the fame that he actually didn’t want. After developing famous iOS tools like the limera1n jailbreak tool and bootrom exploit, he decided to leave the jailbreaking scene because of the debates around his activities, eventually focusing on more important projects. He worked for both Google and Facebook and is now the owner of his own vehicle automation machine learning company called comma.ai.
In addition to becoming the first-ever to unlock an iPhone, Hotz is also known as the one who managed to unlock Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console. His custom firmware eventually ended up being used for playing pirated games on the console, which Sony tried to block with a firmware update.
Hotz eventually decided to publish the root keys of the PlayStation 3 on his website in early 2011, and despite being removed a few days later, Sony filed a lawsuit against him and hacking group fail0verflow. Hotz and Sony reached a settlement later the same year, and the gaming company specifically demanded a permanent injunction to prevent the hacker from ever trying to breach its products.
Many years have passed since then and Apple itself invested heavily in technologies that would block jailbreaking iPhones and unlocking devices. While jailbreaks are still developed occasionally, they mostly target old versions of iOS and nearly every time, they don’t even make it online.
While previous iPhones could be jailbroken by simply visiting a website or using tools that were doing the whole thing automatically and with minimum user interaction, this is no longer the case these days, and the restrictions that Apple has implemented appear to be rather hard to crack. Or at least, they are so complex that no skilled hacker out there is willing to spend too much time on breaching them.
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