What’s the best way to get Apple to do a non-warranty repair on your bricked or broken iPhone or iPad? Simple: tell the truth.

I have seen all kinds of schemes cooked up by people who have done something ill-advised to their devices. They have a strategy. They know how to fool the liquid sensors. They have a story for the dent they couldn’t pound out. They play innocent when their product is mysteriously bricked. They have a plan for every contingency.

When all else fails, they make noise, complain to the manager, write angry letters to SJ and the media. Finally, they post on internet forums and try to win in the court of public opinion. Well, I’m here to tell you, there is a better way.

Last night, I called the local Apple store to tell them I had bricked my iPad. I made it clear that it was my fault. They told me to go ahead and bring it in anyway and made an appointment for that night.

When I was called, I repeated that it was bricked because of something that I did, and just hoped they could reset it. They gave me no guarantees, but promised to try, and try, they did. After about an hour, they told me that it was as good as fried. I thanked them and did my best to hold it together.

The rep was not done talking. She said they would consider it a warranty repair, and simply gave me a brand new, 32 GB 3G iPad. I was shocked. I told her I couldn’t accept it, as they owed me nothing. It was not a warranty issue and I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble over my mistake. She told me that Apple was more interested in making me happy. She also told me not to ever do that again.

My wife was also floored by the generosity of service. I know that if I had gone in with some lame story, I would have been out of luck. No need. This was not my first, such experience, but it was the most dramatic.

If you damage your device, don’t try to hide the evidence, or make up a story. Just tell the truth. There is a reason why Apple keeps getting the highest scores for customer satisfaction.

This is an official entry by dandbj13 in TiPb’s next top blogger contest. Think you have what it takes to join Team TiPb? Bring it!

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

AnySIM, the free software unlock by the iPhone Dev Wiki crowd, now works with iPhones that are running firmware version 1.1.1. The first version of AnySIM, released for 1.0 versions of the iPhone firmware, didn’t unlock the iPhone correctly. So, when folks that unlocked their iPhones with AnySIM updated to 1.1.1, it bricked their iPhones. This version of AnySIM doesn’t fix that issue. They claim that this version won’t cause the same problems as the earlier versions, but it might be a good idea to hold off on unlocking with AnySIM for a while anyway, caveat emptor. You have been warned. Speaking personally, I went crawling back to iPhoneSimFree to fix the broken AnySIM unlock. But, if all of those warnings are of no use to you, you can get the new version of Anysim here.

To say in the very least, the 1.1.1 version hasn’t been popular with many folks. A lot of people think that Apple went over the line in bricking iPhones, but that opinion isn’t shared by everybody. Rainer Brockenhoff, for example, doesn’t think that the firmware update was malicious in nature, that it was technical in nature. Erica Sadun of TUAW agrees:

“If they wanted to brick hacked iPhones, they could have done a much better job of it.”

Sadun, speaking in an interview with Wired, thinks that the iPhone 1.0 firmware was a rush job, something done to get it out the door in time for the deadline that Jobs imposed when he announced the iPhone in January. Wired speculates that the 1.1.1 firmware update is a “[from the] ground-up rewrite,” with many security features like CRC checksums and new firmware encryption schemes.

And the 1.1.1 firmware hasn’t been all roses. There are many reports of problems with the update (exhibits one, two, and three). Sadun goes as far to call it “messed-up” and “botched.” Our own Dieter Bohn had a few agonizing hours trying to figure out how he destroyed the audio after the update. All of it makes this Jobs quote from the NY Times more awkward:

“You don’t want your phone to be like a PC… The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

Similarly, you don’t want to have hacked your iPhone and applied the update and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. And I think a lot of the people that bricked their iPhones won’t be rushing out to buy another one in spite of this helpful spokesperson’s advice:

“If the damage was due to use of an unauthorized software application, voiding their warranty, they should purchase a new iPhone.”

It sounds like a lot of people may have applied the unlocks that are causing trouble with the 1.1.1 update. Apple risks losing a lot of the good will press that they’ve enjoyed so much of for free over the past few years, and I’m curious to see how they handle this current fiasco.

I’m speculating idly, but I wonder if Apple is looking to fix their mistake by posting another firmware update that fixes some of the repoted installation and sync problems, and de-bricks some of the unlocked iPhones. The last time they were getting negative press like this (the price cut), they posted their $100 early adopter bit, and they were pretty dang quick about it. How Apple ends up dealing with bricked iPhones could say alot about whether that price cut was a reaction to events or a carefully scripted set of events itself.