iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?
Back when we had commies to worry about, someone came up with the concept of "engage and contain": eg, rather than avoid them as we'd been doing, we should trade and talk and travel there, and by doing so be able to contain their evil.
Context & Ripple Effects
Call Me Fishmeal's essay lands at the end of a contentious first summer for the iPhone. In August, Forbes documented a worm working its way through jailbroken iPhones, evidence that Apple's sealed device was already being pried open whether the company liked it or not.
Early adopters were meanwhile still working out what the device owed them — Jeff Pulver's July Confusnik post captured buyers unsure why they'd purchased one — and Apple had just shipped the iPod touch, extending the same closed software model to a second product line. Against that backdrop, the essay imports Cold War 'engage and contain' logic to argue that locking developers out breeds the very insecurity and frustration it aims to prevent.
First-order effects
- Developers who want to ship iPhone and iPod software face a binary choice: wait indefinitely for Apple to bless an official path, or distribute through jailbreak channels that void warranties and carry the security exposure Forbes documented.
Second-order effects
- If Apple holds the containment line, the hacking community keeps doing the engaging by default — the August worm showed that a closed platform with active circumvention concentrates risk rather than eliminating it, forcing Apple into a reactive patch-and-prosecute posture.
Third-order effects
- The essay frames a structural question for every handset maker of 2007: whether total vendor control over a pocket computer is sustainable against developer demand, or whether phone platforms will be pushed toward the contested-gatekeeping equilibrium the PC world settled into.
The trend: Handset platforms are becoming the decade's decisive test of whether a vendor can fully contain its own ecosystem, or whether developer and hacker pressure forces managed engagement instead.