Now, FOUR Years in China

I was just at a website searching for references to one of my favorite bands of the 80s named “The The”. Most of the time, search engines are tuned by ignoring words like “the”. Thus, finding “the the” references hasn’t been an easy task.

To see what I mean, type “the the” into Google…there’s no reference to the band in the main results area. Now try it again with quotes around it. Typically, Google will catch things like this but this still seems to stump Google.

But you might notice that the sponsored link on the right returned the correct band. I did a search of the iTunes music store and it too found the correct band.

So…note to self. Don’t name a popular band with only fillers or conjuctions.

I’ve met a couple of people in China using the iPhone but due to the fact that it’s locked to AT&T in the U.S, the aren’t using it as a phone…only an internet device and iPod.

When I pushed them about the fact that they spent so much to not have a functional phone, they said that they were fairly confident that a crack would be available at some point. I personally doubt that will happen anytime soon without a combination of re-chipping and patching the kernel.

After thinking about this for a while, I concluded that an announcement of a hackers ability to unlock the iPhone to be used with a different SIM card would initially cause the AAPL stock to climb. The validation and release of the hack would cause a flood of orders for the iPhone in the U.S. and overseas.

In the history of devices and/or the hacking of such devices has there ever been the probability that hacking a particular device would dramatically benefit the manufacturer in terms of market share and stock price?