Well, you can wait for the iPhone Dev Team to come up with a solution, and you know they will, they are the gods of the iPhone, I really don’t see why Apple doesn’t just put them on payroll and save us all the hassle. Or, you can lie.
Here is the deal, Apple’s latest firmware somehow changes the IMEI of your phone (I swear that the last time I checked that was illegal) anyways, that’s how the Apple dudes know if you hacked your phone. Apparently though, this is also affecting all of the prepaid wireless iPhones, not just the hacked ones. This bug is unconfirmed as of yet, which is why there is the Rumor tag.
So you go to the Apple store, and you lie, you tell them that your iPhone was on a prepaid plan, and they should give you a new one no questions. However if you forget to put the AT&T SIM back in, or you aren’t convincing enough, you are back to waiting for the iPhone Dev Team to come back out with a solution, and your warranty will be voided and your iPhone will be blacklisted.
You’ve Bricked your Hacked iPhone and Want to Start Over? [via 9to5Mac]
Bet you that all the prepaid iphones that got bricked was hacked in order for them to be used as prepaid.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/07/20/iphone_now_pay_as_you_go/1
Brilliant grouping of brick and bricked theme iPhone and iPod Touch wallpaper on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/12905355@N05/sets/72157602177330325/
For what its worth (and I am not sure its worth anything) you can get the old IEMI back pretty easy. Take the Sim Card out of the phone. Turn the phone completely off. Now, just hold down the home button as you plug it into your Apple and keep holding it until Itunes brings up a message that the Iphone is in restore mode. Do the restore without the chip in. When the phone has restarted, unplug it and turn it on. It will of course say no sim card is inserted, but when you click the info button, tada, like magic the old number is back. Put the Sim Back and it doesn’t change. Of course, it still gives you the unrecognized sim card error message, and your phone is still a brick, but hey, you’ve got that number on the screen matching the one on the back again. I don’t see this helping too much, because when you bring it in, I have very little faith that they would take the sim out for some reason when they run the restore themselves. After you get the IMEI back, it will go away again the moment you try to restore the phone with the chip reinserted.
One more thought, and probably a retarded one. What if, after reestablshing the IEMI in the cosmetic fashion above, your sim card accidently got microwaved for just long enough to turn it into a brick that you could through right back at apple? What I am saying is the IEMI number is how they tagging these phones for warranty voids. If you get that back, but then completely destroy the sim but in a way that would leave no physical evidence, wouldn’t any future restore with that chip in result as though their were no chip in the phone at the time of the restore? And if so, then all apple has is a phone with the IMEI that it should have, but with a chip that doesn’t give out any IICID just as if it weren’t there. Does any of that make sense. This all seems too simple to me to be a solution that someone hasn’t thought of, so please tell me how I am retarded so that I can just through the thing into traffic and have some satisfaction.
Do you think they would try to test the SIM in another device?
Hello everyone–
Check this out: http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Downgrade_from_1.1.1_to_1.0.2
Be sure to use itunes version 7.4 (26), which can be found on the edgesuite.
If your sick of messing with your bricked phone you can sell it here
http://www.ibuybrickediphones.com