I'm surprised that anyone doubts what chpwn posts, even if it is remarkably quick. After all, he's been doing this stuff for years and is quite well known for his jailbreak work; I'm sure he's spent the better part of 2 or 3 months working on a nice iOS6 hack to make this happen.

(Disclaimer: He's been a friend of mine for years, so I can't say I'm not a bit biased)

No I think most people trust him, he's done a lot of great work in the past. I'm just wondering if he held on to an A5 exploit and it turned out to be identical on the A6 set. If that's the case then it could make for a quicker turnaround for 4s and 5 jailbreaks.

One thing that jailbroken device allows is jitting - for example luajit can run at full speed there, and possibly v8 and others.

Since I decided not to upgrade to iOS6.0 until the maps thing is sorted out, I've been playing around with Cydia today.

For people that might be interested in what you can do (maybe haven't jailbroken before...) here's what I did.

1) Download Absinthe 2.0.4 for windows.

2) Run the the .exe

3) Click jailbreak

They recommend clearing your phone to increase the speed but it only took me 5 minutes (without removing anything). Once completed, it will add the 'Cydia' app to your screen, which you can use to download other apps & utilities.

Now onto the interesting part.. the apps I've installed today, and what they can do for the phone (all are free):

1) f.lux: Just like flux for the desktop, this will modify the temperature settings of the screen to adjust according to your timezone, being much easier on the eyes at night.

2) IconRenamer: Rename any icons. I like this because I can take something like 'Samsung TV Remote' which looks like 'Sams...ote' on my phone and change it to "TV Remote"

3) BrowserChanger: This allows me to install Google Chrome as my browser, and open all URLs by default in Chrome instead of safari (So I get all my synced bookmarks, etc. Opening a link from another app like Alien Blue, will use chrome instead of safari, as well as 'home screen' shortcuts)

4) ColoredKnob: Allows you to change the 'scroll to unlock' icon colour and size.

5) MissionBoard: Triple-Home-Click will open a MissionControl style background-app selector which shows screenshots of the apps in their current state on a nice background.

6) Torch: Adds a nice little icon next to the clock on the lock screen to enable flashlight torch.

7) Weather Icon: Causes the 'Weather' app to display the actual weather with icon and temperature. Runs based on the first weather screen, which can be set to 'local weather'.

8) Zeppelin: Customise the carrier logo. You can choose from things like the apple icon and countless others, which I like instead of having a giant "YES OPTUS" on my screen.

9) Adblock: Blocks ads.

10) SBSettings: Allows me to swipe my status bar to quickly toggle options like 3G / Wifi / Brightness. etc. You can also download themes to make this look more like a iOS native application.

11) NoNewsIsGoodNews: Disables the Newsstand icon which I have NEVER used in iOS.

12) Springflash: Enables me to double-tap the power button for a torch.. Not really necessary but I like it.

13) YTOpener: Automatically opens any youtube links in the new Google YouTube app. Works awesomely well.

14) LSMusicGestures: Adds swipe gestures for music controls to my lock screen. I love this as I dont have ipod controls on my car stereo. It allows me to do things like swipe to skip song, or double-tap to pause/resume a song. This is awesome as it means I no longer have to look at the phone, or try hitting the tiny buttons on the screen while driving.

Doing all of this took about 30 minutes, doesn't do anything to make my phone look 'tacky', and had no issues at all.

Can't believe I havn't been doing this since the day I got my 4S. I had previously tried using some of these apps on my 3G but it was pretty slow. Everything is nice and slick on the 4S though.

Kind of amusing that a lot of what people want from jailbreaking is available now in stock Android.

Apple's hardware is top notch but the fact that people have to hack their OS to get these features says a lot about the inertia in Cupertino.

It's a race to the bottom if everyone in the mobile space just tries to maximize feature checklists. I think it's great that Apple tries to be an arbiter of good taste and user experience, even if they fall down sometimes.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why does actively restricting features that people clearly want enhance user experience, and exemplify good taste? Where's the bad taste in NFC?

I can assure you that that lack of a decent notification centre (like the one Android has had for a long time) is not style, taste or anything else. It's a MAJOR pain in the ass.

To be able to disable wireless with a wipe and a tap is a VERY, VERY, VERY (you get the idea) useful feature.

As I said before, this is not style, taste or anything else but a MAJOR pain.

You say "clearly want" but I you don't know that. You are making an assumption about what "everyone" wants based on what you want, or what you think is important. Maybe this demand goes beyond yourself to your friends (I mean hey, they're your friends because they are simliar to yourself right?)

Tech savvy people get lost in this thinking all the time. I don't get why in a startup focus environment like Hacker News I see this so often.

More doesn't mean better. I'm not trying to defend Apple here, I'm just saying that when you make a grand assumption about what the market wants based on some marketing hype, you've probably been steered in the wrong direction

Right, maybe he doesn't know what everyone wants. But shouldn't the users decide that for themselves? Why put so many restrictions to prevent users from installing 3rd party applications?

Theres a difference between maximizing feteatures and allowing users/3rd parties to add their features. I like that Apple keeps their products (relatively) simple. I am not even entirely apposed to a walled garden app-store. What I do not like is that they took technical measures to prevent users from installing apps that they do not approve.

Sure there's a balance to be struck here but clearly a lot of people think Apple has swung too far to the conservative side.

I don't disagree. There is nothing particularly innovative in iOS 6 or the iPhone 5. I just think that if they had NFC, Google maps, less strict app store policies, and so on they would be indistinguishable from Android. Honestly, if you want to go there, I think Android is in fact getting conservative and WP8 is where the innovation is happening in mobile right now.

I haven't had a chance to actually use a WP8 device yet but I like what I've seen online. I may pick up a 920 just to try it even though I really don't want to commit to another walled-garden ecosystem. I agree that Microsoft seems to be taking much bigger chances than anybody else right now.

I also think Microsoft has far and away the best UI toolkit with C#/XAML.

conservative != slowing

What is WP8 innovating on? Yes, it looks different, but... that's not really the point here is it? It looks gorgeous. I happen to think WP8 > Android (ICS/JB) > iOS in appearance, but it's pretty damn apparent to me that Android > iOS > WP8 in terms of shipping functionality. (And maybe flip the first two for app availability).

I don't see how "Android has a complete feature set" means it's conservative... it's not like they've been removing features from Andorid...

Depends on how you define "a lot". I think the percentage of jail breakers is considerable lower in the general public than "a lot"

It also happens to be considered lower in the general public than the numbers actually demonstrate: out of only hundreds of millions of total devices sold, there are tens of millions out there that are jailbroken.

Even then, you may consider that a "low percentage, certainly nowhere near a majority", but that is still "a lot of people": no one is claiming most people want it different (although if it were easy? dunno).

Well, here in SE Asia it seems to be just about everybody but I suspect that has more to do with app piracy.

Add in the people that bought Android phones for their extra flexibility and you get a lot closer to "a lot".

Yeah. I hate to say it, but when it comes to the iPhone, I'm in it for the hardware at this point. iOS is fast, but lame.

One you missed: Nitrous. Give non-Safari apps (like Chrome) access to the Nitro JS engine. Not just for browsers, but apps like Alien Blue that open pages in a UIWebView.

Thanks! This is a very good selection for me. (I particularly like f.lux)

I only recently jailbroke my iPhone because I wanted to change some APN settings after switching to an MVNO (StraightTalk), but hadn't really installed anything besides Zeppelin, to remove the carrier name. I had the same "tackiness" sticker in my mind about Cydia. A lot of stuff seems to be tacky though, and the store itself feels very cheap as well.

Another great tweak I have going is 5 column springboard and five icon dock. This gives me a grid of 25 apps per screen, pair this with Shrink to change the icon sizes to 90% of original size, you can hardly tell the difference and your phone is that much more useful.

The best thing is that it allows you to have the ESSENTIAL apps: phone, mail, browser, music and messages all in the bottom tray.

How's the battery life? The FUD (?) around that is pretty much the only thing keeping me from jailbreaking.

Looking at the list of things he installed, I see absolutely no reason why any of it should affect battery performance.

The problem is that once you give someone the power to do anything they want, some of the things the want to do are things that have consequences they don't want, and many people aren't good at correlating the benefits to the costs, even when it "seems obvious".

As an example: if you install something that lets you have an animated HTML5 wallpaper, you are going to have some changes to your battery life. You may also see changes to general performance if the wallpaper doesn't deactivate while you are using apps.

However: that's very specific to that extension. If you install something that changes what happens when a text message comes in, then (barring bugs in the implementation) it is only going to happen when a text message comes in, which is likely negligible.

To the extent to which it is not negligible, then it should be a direct cost of the feature: if you want incoming text messages to be converted to a 3D ray-traced animation of Tom Hanks reading them aloud and uploaded to your Twitter account, that's going to take more power than, say, playing a different sound if the message contains the word "epic".

Haven't really had it installed long enough here to notice, but my percentage hasn't gone down any more than it would normally in 3 hours or so.

When using it previously on my 3G it had little to no effect on battery life, the phone itself was just slow. (I didn't jailbreak my 3G until after the iOS 4.0 update turned it to treacle)

Huh? No offense but just jailbreaking your phone and then using it the same as always is going to have ZERO effect on your phone. If you use it with weird apps or have an animated homescreen background, yeah, you're going to see a battery hit. Just like if you install an app that streams music over 3g all day (regardless of whether or not you've jailbroken).

No offense taken. 

I think it should be pretty clear that by "jailbreaking" I'm also referring to installing and using non-App store apps (what's the point otherwise?). I'm particularly concerned with the affect of running many apps that are using undocumented/unsanctioned apis (such as with the app that updates the weather icon). iOS has a bunch of restrictions to prevent apps from astonishingly degrading performance of the system (e.g. the API discourages or prevents apps from running invisibly in the background)

I've found "Springtomize" to be a good investment on Cydia. It can hide the Newsstand just like 11) and change the carrier text (no icon AFAIK), but it can also hide everything else- bye bye Stocks, Weather, Compass, Voice Memos, ...

14) Try "Now Player" and "Audium" (both from the app store). They do what you described, and are extremely pretty and nice.

I tend to think that Apple, and Android manufacturers for that matter, aren't really interested in full lockdown. Jailbreaking is a selling point for a good sized fraction of the market.

Apple can't really keep vulnerabilities in iOS even if people demand jailbreaks. It's their obligation to patch them whenever possible to avoid third parties using the same hole to do something malicious.

Except Apple hired Comex, a well known iPhone hacker, to improve security

If that were the case, why wouldn't they make it easier?

2 major reasons:

The content industry

Segmenting markets geopraphically

They don't trust Cydia, which is understandable.

That's completely contrary to the idea that Apple is deliberately letting people circumvent the lockdown, though.

Marketing via nerdsniping. http://xkcd.com/356/

It has to be a challenge to make it interesting.

When it comes to Apple, I seriously doubt it.

This isn't that hard to believer, chpwn is incredibly talented and to be fair iOS 6 has been available in beta form for quite some time now (enough to work out how to potentially jailbreak it).

It's interesting to see whether it is an A5(X)-exploit that works on the A6 too, or if it's a iOS6 (perhaps iOS5) userland exploit.

I'm not upgrading my i4S to the i5 until the jailbreak is available. Hope to see it soon.