‘Absinthe A5’ Brings First Untethered Jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2
Noted iOS jailbreak author pod2g has teamed up with the Chronic Dev Team to release “Absinthe A5”, an enhancement to the popular Greenpois0n jailbreaking tool which adds the ability to perform an untethered jailbreak …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jailbreaking has been a running feature of the iPhone since 2007, when TUAW covered an instant one-click jailbreak within months of launch. What changed with each Apple silicon generation was the difficulty: the iPhone Dev-Team's Redsn0w delivered untethered jailbreaks for A4-era devices like the untethered iOS 4.3.3 release in May 2011, but the A5 chips inside the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 had held out.
Absinthe A5 closes that gap. Pod2g, whose exploit work had been tracked through late 2011, joined forces with the Chronic Dev Team to extend Greenpois0n — a collaboration rather than a solo release, notable because it pools two teams' exploits against Apple's newest hardware. Apple has shown before that it retaliates in software, having crippled iBooks for jailbroken devices in early 2011.
First-order effects
- iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners gain the first untethered jailbreak for A5 devices, meaning the hack survives reboots without reconnecting to a computer — the usability bar Redsn0w set on older hardware.
Second-order effects
- Apple's likely counter is a patched iOS update, following its 2011 pattern of breaking jailbreak-dependent features like iBooks; the pod2g–Chronic Dev collaboration raises the odds the underlying exploit survives at least one more firmware cycle.
Third-order effects
- If team-to-team exploit pooling becomes the norm, jailbreaking consolidates around fewer, better-resourced groups, and each new Apple chip class resets the clock on a predictable release-and-patch arms race.
The trend: iOS jailbreaking is settling into a generational arms race in which each new Apple chip delays the untethered release until developer coalitions pool exploits to break it.