Leo Laporte, television personality for the long gone TechTV network, owner of the TWiT Netcast Network, and radio host for The Tech Guy, has been a big fan of Apple in past years. Unfortunately for Apple, they upset Leo Laporte and many others who own an iPhone with a recent update to the firmware.

To get you up to speed, people who have been reverse engineering the iPhone have enabled a great amount of hacks to be performed. Software that allows you to have custom ring tones and much more are only the beginning. Available hacks could even allow you to completely unlock your iPhone, making it useable on any network that would support it.

Apple did not want this to happen, and the reasons being are unknown considering that in the past, Apple has been much more friendly to hackers.
Image Credit: iPhoneHacks.com
Leo Laporte has probably also been hacking around with his iPhone, and who could blame him? It is his device, and he should be able to do what he wants with it, right? On his blog, LOL: The Life of Leo, he wrote a very critical analogy of this situation:
...When I paid for the cow [reference to iPhone] it became my property, to do with as I please. If you [reference to Apple] don’t like how I’m using it you may choose not to do any further business with me but you don’t get to kill my cow.

And, by the way, warning me you’d kill my cow if I keep making cheese doesn’t make it all right.

The lawyers will point out that contractually I agreed to your terms. True. But I don’t think the contract said anything about killing the cow did it?

Apple’s sole redress is to halt all support of my phone. If we let Apple destroy our property for not following the rules we’re telling the music industry it’s ok to destroy a hard drive containing illegal songs, the cable company to fry our TVs for stealing cable. That is vigilante justice and a direct threat to the rule of law.
It is clear that Apple's decision to render the iPhone unusable with a recent update was not in the best interest of either the customers or the company. Upsetting a voice like Leo Laporte just made everything much more difficult for Apple.

Ironically enough, the iPhone Dev Team (a community of iPhone hackers) have pulled off an achievement by allowing you to bring an iPhone back to life by downgrading the firmware, and while it seems like a somewhat complicated process, it is likely the only choice for now by the people who have bricked iPhones.

This is an ongoing battle between the hackers and Apple, and there is likely to be more news about the situation in the future, and more heartbreaks by Apple. Let us just hope that any hacks for the iPods do not render them unusable as well.