jailbroke and back again
Yesterday, I jailbroke my iPhone. It was the cool thing to do. There were promises of slick new interface elements and pretty home screens. And, while there were pretty home screens and slick interface elements, there was also a bunch of baggage: extra apps for managing my jailbroken phone, utilities with ‘challenging’ interfaces, and a general feeling that now my phone was dirty.
The fancy new home screen was great, but there were just a few icons to fix. I quickly realized that I would be endlessly dissatisfied, knowing that I could make the changes, update the things that I thought could be better, skin all the ugly apps with new images.
What’s more, I remembered why I use Apple products in the first place. Sure there are a million choices in the PC (Windows/Android) world. I can make things look this way or that. I can download this or that utility. I can use this or that hardware. But really, I don’t want to. I want my phone to be done when I buy it. I want to know what it does, and how I’m going to do it. I don’t want to scour message boards for help when I’m in over my head.
iPhoto works, iTunes works, iMovie works, iChat works, Safari works, Apple stuff works. Sure there might be a program that lets you organize photos better than iPhoto, or a faster music player than iTunes. But my Mac was handed to me preloaded with 98.3% of what I want my computer to do. You can’t put a price on that.
And before I jailbroke, my phone was the same way. So, I restored my backup, and my iPhone is back to normal. All is right with the world.