* Gizmodo says Don't buy an iPhone

This week's Apple iPhone update may have bricked a few hacked phones, but this is the least important part of the problem. What probably upset many more early adopters was the way Apple wiped out their applications, reducing their phones to the "official" software. This sent out a very clear message: The iPhone is for dummies. It's not for gadget freaks, who only represent a tiny minority of the market. The Gizmodo gadget blog has therefore changed its iPhone recommendation to Don't Buy. It says:Screw the unlock for a second. Let's talk about the those third-party apps. While my 4GB iPhone is a brick, and the 8GB phone, which I kept on a totally legit AT&T contract, is now stripped down. Programs like the faux-GPS, IM clients, Flickr Upload, and NES emulator -- what did they ever do but make the iPhone far better than the stock original? They made it far more competitive with open-platform superphones like the Nokia N95, to which I will now be switching.As someone remarks in a comment to the post, Gizmodo has gone from "Jesus Christ himself owned one of these (prove he didn't)" to "It's crap, don't buy it" in the time it took to update firmware.The interesting question is whether Apple cares. It's stopped being a computer company and become a consumer electronics company, and while most computer companies love hackers and geeks, consumer electronics companies hate them. They want absolute control of their products. They don't want people messing them around.In fact, this has always been Steve Jobs's aim. The Apple II -- designed by Steve Wozniak -- was an open system, for its day: it had expansion slots, so you could take the lid off and use it for thousands of applications that Woz had never even imagined. The Mac, developed under Steve Jobs's control, was a closed system. It was intended to be an appliance, like a washing machine, and Jobs quipped that there were no user groups for Maytags. It was only after Jobs was kicked out of Apple that the Mac was opened up with the Mac II, launched in 1987. (The Mac II was like a standard PC: it didn't have a built-in monitor, and it did have expansion slots.)After the Second Coming, when Jobs resumed control of Apple, he dramatically reduced the number of models and launched the iMac. Since then he has consistently moved the Mac line towards locked-down systems more and more like the 1984 original. (You don't like the limited built-in graphics? Tough.)Everything about Steve Jobs's history and character says "it's my way or the highway." He demands absolute control. That hasn't worked very well in the computer industry but it's standard in the mobile phone business. Now Jobs has finally moved into an industry where control freakery is the norm, why would you expect him to give it up?