This reminds me of the "silver bullet" that cable companies put out some years ago to kill off "unauthorized" decoder boxes. Basically, they were trying to prevent folks from getting decoder boxes from anywhere but the cable company. I don't recall what came of it directly, but I do notice that 3rd party decoder boxes are no longer considered taboo.
I see what you're saying Harpgliss, but I also think that this is a bit different from what you're viewing it as. You mention bricking an Axim and trying to get Dell to replace it. Trouble is, there's not really another product that's analogous to this.
If I buy a Nokia phone from Cingular, they lock it. I can go to any of scores of web services and get it unlocked. I'm still bound by my contract, unless I payed full price and declined to sign a contract. Neither Nokia, nor Cingular is harmed in any way by my unlocking my phone so that I can use it on another service if I should choose to do so at some point.
What's happening with these iPhones is that folks are buying them at full price, no subsidy. Evidently, in a lot of cases, they're not signing any sort of contract to use any particular service. They're unlocking those phones and using them with the service of their choice (something which has been established practice for other phones for some time).
If Apple releases an update that, as an
accidental side effect, bricks them, that's one thing, if they set out as a specific goal to do so, that's another. I tend to agree that they would likely lose a law suit (and almost certainly face one) under that circumstance.
Exercising control over the use of Hardware is not something that most folks are prepared to accept. Exercising it over software is a somewhat different matter, though I can see Microsoft getting sued out of existence if they were to deliberately send out something that permanently locked up the OS if someone hooked up, say, a printer of a particular brand or something to it.
Declining to support something isn't the same as messing with the function of something that was already working.