An important factor is that overarching all the groups and individuals is the mac community who ensured that all solutions were found, tried, tested, improved rapidly, a kind of community RAD.

I guess it’s also the highest-profile phone to have a concerted Web community effort towards removing the operator lock-in (whereas previously a quick trip to ‘Mr Phones’ in South London would have done the trick.)

Cheers
Kev

PS Remind me to explain why ‘to brick’ was already a verb, in UK English at least!

I think you’ve got terms confused too:
‘When the first iPhone “jailbreak” method came out, people were a bit tentative. Surely Apple would “fix” this in a subsequent update. Indeed they did, resulting in the “great bricking.” ‘

Actually, if you were only jail-broken (breaked? jailed-breaked? I hate these terms) the phone wasn’t bricked, you had to be SIM-unlocked as well to get bricked, so I for instance was fine. I updated and was no longer jail-broken but wasn’t bricked.

+1 to the last paragraph as well.

-M