Ever since Sunday's post about the death of a new iPhone, much progress has been made in cracking the 4.6 bootloader that comes with new 1.1.2 iPhones.
But first, let's take a look at current OTB 1.1.2 unlocking methods. The options available are
- TurboSIM (pros: cheapest unlock so far, non-destructive modification, cons: still more expensive than a software unlock)
- The official unlock via iTunes (pros: officially sanctioned, cons: obscenely priced at 999 euros)
- Unofficial hardware unlock (pros: unlocked iPhone, cons: destructive modifications required)
As you may have noticed, each of the hardware unlocks mentioned above come with several major drawbacks. With this in mind, we'll now look at the devious plans of iPhone hackers.
Hackint0sh member pspsully has outlined three areas that are being worked on at this very moment. The first two deal with hardware based unlocks which wouldn't be very useful to many people. The last item, which focuses on a software exploit for the 4.6 bootloader, has already been achieved.
However, geohot has pointed out that a new firmware needs to be released by Apple in order for this to be of any use, due to a logic change in the new bootloader. In the post where pspsully mentions the new bootloader exploit, he explains this issue of requiring a new firmware release in further detail.
Unfortunately, all this means that
When we get the next firmware update, once the secpack is retrieved, we should have no problem unlocking 1.1.2 with bootloader 4.6, however, after the next firmware comes out, we WILL NOT be able to update to it as we will then need the secpack from the one AFTER THAT to unlock it.
In short, if no workaround is found, software unlockers will always be one version behind Apple's latest firmware.