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Oh man. This is one hell of a story. I was reading the Consumerist today and I ran into a little entry about how Colin M. walked into AT&T to buy a refurbished iPhone. The story goes that he was barraged by intrusive questions and in the end they refused to sell him a refurbished iPhone because they assumed he was going to unlock it.

If you haven't read this story, read it here.

That just peed me off. I mean, how can they just do that? You're paying for it, aren't you? Then shouldn't you be able to do whatever the hell you want with it? I'm planning on buying an iPhone (and unlock it of course!) but if I'm going to be subjected to this, then maybe I might just buy it on Ebay for convenience sake.

I also read somewhere that unlocked iPhones cost Apple $300 million in losses. Well, that's the price you pay for using a closed network and a sleuth of angry unlock-happy programmers on your ass. You can't just do that anymore. You make the product, and we do whatever we want with it in order for it to suit our needs. Here's a solution. I bet if Apple made the an AT&T version as well as an unlocked version of the iPhone, then they wouldn't be hemorrhaging losses in excess of millions. After speaking to a few unlocked iPhone owners myself, they all agreed that they would pay a little more for an unlocked version of the iPhone sans getting the AT&T version and unlocking it themselves.

Oh well, I'm just glad the SDK came out so third party applications will now be made available on the iPhone. I'm probably going to wait a while before purchasing one. Who knows, it could be legally unlocked a year from now.

Oh, the Apple store has refurbished iPhones (8 Gb) for $349. Not a sweet deal, but if you plan on unlocking it, then it is :)