iPhone 4S Has Been Jailbroken, Hack Enables Siri on iPhone 4 148
Diggester writes "Unless their chipset has already been exploited and jailbroken on a previous device, it takes a lot of time for the iOS jailbreaking community to jailbreak for a new iOS device. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both of which are based on a still unexploited dual-core A5 chip, haven't received a jailbreak for iOS 5 yet. However, it appears they'll be getting one soon, as a certain eminent iPhone hacker has let us know that the iPhone 4S has jailbroken, and a jailbreak for the iPad 2 is in the works." In related news, Hackers have succeeded in bringing a limited port of Apple's new Siri voice assistant feature onto jailbroken versions of the iPhone 4 and the fourth-generation iPod touch.
Re:A though on why the iPhone 4 does not have Siri (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple could've easily built a larger server farm to handle the larger load. They chose not to.
Re:We don't care. We don't use iPhones. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We don't care. We don't use iPhones. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would hope a more fair assessment of the Slashdot "we" would categorize us as people who recognize that Android and iOS are both very significant mobile platforms, and are thus neither surprised nor outraged when an important milestone on a product with millions of current or future users is reported here. Especially a milestone likely to be directly of interest to a "hacker" community.
So I would instead say: the rest of us are well-adjusted enough not to take the slightest pretext to open up a platform religious war of in which everyone is already fully aware of the pros and cons on both sides.
Re:A though on why the iPhone 4 does not have Siri (Score:1, Insightful)
It's obviously to get people to buy the 4s.
Apple does this CONSTANTLY - they leave features out of their early versions of things just so a year later they can release the same hardware BUT WITH A CAMERA ADDED and idiot Apple fans will then plunk down another $500 for the new version.
Re:A though on why the iPhone 4 does not have Siri (Score:5, Insightful)
Since there's not much of a technical reason the iPhone 4 cannot have Siri, I think a big part of why it's only on the 4s (and not even the iPad 2) is to help Apple understand server load from the service before it goes live for 100 million+ people.
That plausible but I'd suspect a couple other reasons too. First, when you rollout something new you want to make sure it does not get a reputation for sucking. One way to do this is to roll it out only on the best machines. And also as you say a smaller foot print helps control things. Second, I'd bet it is full of debugging code and is not optimized. It is known already it chews batteries. If you put this on older phones with tired batteries it's going to get a bad reputation.
So there's reasons besides the naked one of forcing upgrades.
Re:A though on why the iPhone 4 does not have Siri (Score:5, Insightful)
meh... they want to give people a reason to upgrade to 4S from 4
I think considering that the iPad 2, which has a faster processor than the 4s doesn't have Siri, this is a very strong probability.
I'm annoyed that I haven't found much in the app store that takes advantage of the new processor.
Re:A though on why the iPhone 4 does not have Siri (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, it's Apple. They could take the iPhone 4, put it in a different case, call it the iPhone 5, and fanbois would line up to get one.
Heck, they could put an iPhone 3 in a new case, call it an iPhone 5, and probably most Apple fanbois would want one.
Re:A though on why the iPhone 4 does not have Siri (Score:4, Insightful)
Some probably would upgrade. After all, some people have unlimited money for all intents and purposes in this discussion. But mainly I think it is a product differentiator for new customers or the old customers that are upgrading from an older iPhone to one of the newer ones.
I recently upgraded from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4. The reason I didn't go with the 4s is that it was more expensive and the faster CPU and Siri didn't really appeal to me.
I don't believe the faster CPU and GPU are a big sell on their own to the general public. Apple needed some VISIBLE new feature to differentiate the 4s. They came up with Siri, which TBH currently appears a little dumb to me.