My iPhone is locked to AT&T, and AT&T say they can’t (or won’t) unlock it so it can be used with another carrier (even though I paid up when I broke the contract, and did everything legitimately, not to mention that I moved out of the U.S. and wouldn’t use it with anyone competing with AT&T), and Apple won’t do it either as far as I know.
In Sweden, the carrier(s) will unlock your iPhone for $30 if you’ve had a contract with them for a year, but they will only do it if you originally bought the iPhone from them, so I can’t bring in my now-useless AT&T-locked iPhone and have it unlocked either.
As great as it is was to have an iPhone, it’s completely ridiculous that to be able to use it as a phone my only option should be to use some third party hack/jailbreak, which is something I really don’t want to do (and why I still haven’t). But I suppose that’s a major theme of this decade that has just been: the failure of companies to give the consumers what they want, which in turn has resulted in a culture where illegality, piracy and hacking is the norm.
