iOS 7 Jailbreak Blues and Other Unforeseen Consequences of WWDC 2013

When Apple announced its new line of products at the World Wide Developers Conference Keynote Monday, developers and tech reporters had a lot of new information to sort through. Now that there's been some time for reflection on what was said, what was understated, and what wasn't said at all, there are a few unexpected consequences, intended by Apple or not, that appear to be emerging from the post-keynote fog. And some of these unforeseen outcomes may affect the jailbreaking community, cellular carriers, high-tech professionals, and Apple's future alike.

Jailbreaking

Let's start with perhaps the most fervent and furtive fan base of Apple's iOS—the jailbreakers. They love Apple products, just not Apple's limitations on how customers use those products. Jailbreaking is the process of gaining root access to iOS, removing Apple's imposed software limitations and allowing the installation and use of non-Apple approved, third-party software on iOS devices. Because jailbreaking involves meddling with the system software, certain features can become unstable or useless, especially Apple security features. Needless to say, Apple is not a fan of jailbreaking its devices

Now that iOS 7 has been introduced, there are a couple consequences for the jailbreaking community. First: the ability of programmers to provide regular updates on their jailbreaking software. According to ZDNet, with the introduction of Find My iPhone's new feature, Activation Lock, Apple may have just stepped up its game patching up iOS jailbreak exploits while also providing a powerful new disincentive for people thinking of jailbreaking their devices.

Activation Lock is a feature that becomes enabled if a thief decides to disable Find My iPhone. If he does that, or tries to wipe the phone, Activation Lock deactivates the phone, keeping your data safe and making the iPhone useless to the thief. ZDNet reasons that if Activation Lock is to be worth anything at all, it will be hard to bypass by jailbreaking, which would defeat the point of the feature, and Apple will have to keep up to date patching security flaws, which makes it harder for jailbreakers to crack iOS. One purported jailbreaker, though not part of the famous and confident Evasi0n team, has said that with the advent of iOS 7, "in all honesty, the jailbreak scene looks pretty bleak now."

Besides the fact that jailbreaking might become more difficult (though never impossible), and that Activation Lock may become a disincentive for people to jailbreak their devices anyway, there are lots of new features in iOS 7 that take their cues from previous jailbreak apps. Basically, iOS 7 may be so feature-rich that people may not look beyond Apple for their iPhone software. iOS 7's Control Center and multitasking, for example, may take the place of Auxo, Multifl0w, and SBSettings, popular jailbreak tweaks for switching between apps, controlling settings, and multitasking.

Phone Carriers

As Rebecca Greenfield of the Atlantic Wire noted, Apple's keynote demonstration of iOS 7 at WWDC included lots of new features, one of which was mentioned almost in passing, but which could be a big deal to wireless carriers in the coming months and years. That feature was FaceTime Audio, a high quality audio-only version of Apple's FaceTime option in iMessage.

What's the big deal? Imagine never paying for minutes on your phone plan again.

VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is what FaceTime Audio basically is. VoIP is what FaceTime, Skype and the Facebook Messenger apps use to enable voice chatting over the Internet, using data instead of minutes. While Skype and Facebook Messenger are more dependent on whether the person you're calling has the app and has receiving enabled, FaceTime Audio will be baked in to iOS 7, meaning anyone with an iOS 7 device who you can call, can just as easily chat with you over FaceTime Audio using WiFi. Using data for VoIP depends on whether the network allows the feature, which isn't in its best interest, so that's going to continue to be sketchy for the moment. But FaceTime Audio and VoIP calling may be the future, especially with Apple making it easier than ever. FreedomPop recently made headlines by becoming the first all-data mobile service to offer VoIP-calling, data, and texting for free.

Pro Users

As I mentioned Tuesday, when Apple gave everyone a sneak peak of the brand new Mac Pro — a high-powered professional desktop computer that features a new revolutionary design and is about a quarter the size of the previous Mac Pro model — they forgot to mention that with the incredibly compact design comes a lack of expandability, except on the outside. The new Mac Pros have flash drives for storage, no optical drive for DVDs or other media, and two next-generation GPUs that are soldered into the motherboard.

While looking very sleek and small, this means if the Mac Pro is to be useful for professionals it will need to have a spiders-web of cables coming out of its backside, connected to a desktop-dominating slew of external disk drives, DVD writers, and other peripherals, not to mention the three 4K monitors that it can support. Basically, the unintended reality of using a Mac Pro is not quite as elegant a picture as that little black cylinder sitting all by itself.