Image by pvera via FlickrThe moral outrage starts in 3..2..1This one is going to be awesome because it is really skirting the law on what a company can force you to do when you agree to use a product or service. Think car parts: Ford can't keep you from buying non-Ford branded parts for your car, which means cheaper brake pads for you. If you could only buy brake pads from Ford, they would be able to price them based on what the market would bear. Because they have to compete with a lot of third party vendors, they have to price theirs accordingly. The same way, Ford can't force you to use a specific brand of gas or lubricants, or drive through specific roads, etc.
If Apple tries to do this with their phones, they will eventually find themselves explaining to a judge why this behavior isn't anti-competitive. Is Apple entitled to shut down your phone if you don't use it the way they want you to? Why not just void the warranty? Sign the firmware with a horribly complex key, then whenever somebody tries to claim warranty on a phone check the signature. If it fails, refuse service, the same way they refuse service if the water sensor has been triggered.
What's probably going to happen is that they are going to turn iOS into a Windows-like license. If the device boots up, and it doesn't detect a valid license, everything except 911 and calling the phone company is disabled. This will probably be legal, because all Apple is doing is making sure that the software has been paid for, something that Microsoft has been trying to do all along. It is going to be a bit of a rough start for Apple because they are not used to locking their consumer operating systems with keys. They do with commercial products, but not the desktop version of OSX.
Jailbreakers are going to bitch about it, but Apple can always decide to treat jailbroken copies of OSX as illegal copies, since the license doesn't grant you any right to tamper with the OS signatures, a security measure.
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