iPhone OS 3.1 Jailbroken Almost Immediately (Just Not For Everyone)
Sometimes it pays to sit back from the bleeding edge a little. Like when the Dev Team releases their Pwnage Tool for iPhone 3.1, and it doesn't work on the 3GS or the new Touch. But it will, you see.
Context & Ripple Effects
The jailbreak of iPhone OS 3.0 beta back in April set the expected rhythm: each Apple firmware release gets broken within days by the same small group of hackers. What changed with this release is who has to wait — Pwnage Tool covers iPhone OS 3.1 on existing devices but fails on the iPhone 3GS and the newest iPod touch, per the confirmed relationship record.
This is a continuation of a two-year arc rather than an anomaly: the Dev Team broke v1.1.1 in October 2007 (preliminary jailbreak announced the day before the update landed) and delivered the next update's jailbreak before it even shipped that November, then cracked the iPhone 3G's lock in December 2008. The gap this time is hardware-bound, not skill-bound.
First-order effects
- Owners of original iPhones, iPhone 3G units, and older iPod touches can jailbreak iPhone OS 3.1 immediately via PwnageTool, while 3GS and new-touch owners face a choice: stay on 3.0 with their jailbreak intact, upgrade and lose it, or hold off entirely.
Second-order effects
- Apple's newer silicon effectively becomes its first line of defense against jailbreaking — if hardware revisions slow the Dev Team where firmware patches never did, expect future device launches to be judged partly on how long they resist.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, jailbreaking settles into a two-tier cycle: instant breaks for legacy hardware and lagging breaks for each new chip generation, concentrating leverage over the scene in whichever team solves the hardware problem first.
The trend: The iPhone cat-and-mouse is shifting from a software patch race Apple keeps losing to a hardware-revision race where each new device buys Apple weeks instead of days.