Email, social networking, instant messaging, collaboration tools, productivity tools, office suites, development tools, and even entire operating systems are available for free. There is every opportunity for someone to "participate in society" without illegally obtaining something they don't want to pay for.

The developer is the creator of the app, and he or she is the one who gets to decide whether you can try it for free. There is no other way to support the developer than paying for their work in some way or another.

So first off, iDevices aren't made for hackers. They're made for consumers. The amount of people who need a root shell on their iPhone is probably about the same amount of people who will post in this thread saying they need a root shell (I'm exaggerating but it's a seriously small number).

There are free apps that let you SSH into servers already on the app store. If one doesn't suit you there's always the option of creating one. Too expensive? Then submit it to one of the stores for Jailbroken iPhones. They'll probably be more interested in it than the regular App Store using population anyway.

Trying out apps before you buy one is a really great idea and I wish it was possible with iOS apps. I get people using Hackulous and such to try apps before they buy but what I don't buy into is this idea that there's a huge population of iOS users who are using Jailbroken phones and apps to "try before you buy". I don't have solid numbers and I doubt anyone really does but experience and observation tell me that the amount of people who Jailbreak a phone just to try before you buy is incredibly low with the majority just trying and never buying. I myself Jailbroke my first generation iPhone when I first got it. You know what I did with it? Totally got a bunch of paid apps for free with intention of never paying for them. I was poor and even $0.99 was too much for me. I was an asshole and I know this. I haven't done that since 2008 or so though.

Now, when you say "Besides, there are poor ppl out there with iDevices" my mind gets kind of boggled. How in the hell are poor people getting iDevices if they're so poor? If they can afford even the subsidized iPhone or the low-end iPod then you'd think an app that costs $0.99 - $2.99 wouldn't be all that much. But even if we assume this is a valid reason (excuse is the word I'd use personally) does being poor entitle you to goods at a lower cost or free? I've been poor. I know what poor is better than most and I can say that looking back I wasn't so poor that I couldn't afford iOS apps. I was just incredibly cheap as a result of how poor I was. That $1 - $5 was just going to get pissed away on something equally stupid and quickly squandered like a pack of cigarrettes. I feel for the poor people but I can't get behind the idea that it's alright to pirate software because you can't afford it. The old "they wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is so lame. If they wouldn't buy it anyway then they shouldn't have it anyway and maybe if they couldn't circumvent the payment process they'd actually give saving up for whatever "they" want to pirate the ol' college try.

Pirating helps people participate in society you say? Depends on your definition of participate. If it means they get to use a copy of Photoshop for free rather than something cheaper that they paid for that's really not good participation. Again, I've been on the shit-end of poor and I was able to participate as a creator without piracy. Yes, I did do it but there was nothing stopping me from participating with what I had available. I feel like this whole line of thought comes from this weird idea that many young people, my peers (I'm only 26), have these days that somehow we're somehow entitled to start out at the top. That we're too good to "slum it" and work our way up. Participating in society could mean doing the ethical thing and paying for the goods you use. That's good participation the way I see it.

So iMacs are more expensive overseas. That sucks. It really does. But I doubt it's some conspiracy to empty the pockets of European Mac users. That's life, man. Some things suck but you just do what you gotta do to make it.

@piracy is not right but we all can afford and tolerate it. The above statement strikes me as fundamentalistic, it seems to disregard the arbitrary character of content-pricing, it's virtual nature and insinuates that copying is stealing. We don't live in an ideal world and pretending everyone can "do it" and who doesn't is lazy, is propaganda.

piracy is more than downloading apps, it's movies, tv-series and so on, ppl with low income who can't, don't deserve it then?

@terminal emulators the most used app on my iphone2G was erika sadun's utilities, I didn't pirate any app.

Lets look to slovakia. With under 1000$ average income you would invest in PS6 for 800€ esp. if you start your own project? - The alternative would be gimp?

@iMacs haven't talked about conspiracy, just showing that framesets are different.

If they're that poor they should probably get something more affordable. Also, complaining about taxes is best done by complaining to your local politician / MP, not by pirating apps.

wasn't complaining, there is a price differential between US and EU electronics & media content which widens even more if one considers the lower purchasing power.

@ppl eg. get unemployed and own devices (suffering by recession anyone). Being poor is not necessarily a choice or a selfcaused taint.

I am also pinging ocassionaly other servers and have to do it from another device than my iPad if it is not jailbreaked.

Imho, you all seem to be to accustomed to appliances - I favor open devices without those hastles. And being unable to inspect a good before purchasing it, if it is something lasting like software sucks.

Surely an Android device would have been a better choice? Jailbreaking is a kludge, it doesn't make the iPhone less encumbered from the average user's perspective.

That done with, from the "average user's perspective", jailbreaking an iPhone 4 gets you more freedoms from less invested time and with less required knowledge than even a a "truly open" Nexus device: the tools are more centralized and easier to find how-tos that expect nothing more than "I sort of know enough to use YouTube", they are less technical to operate (and often even quite graphical; sometimes even having been embedded in web pages for a "slide to jailbreak‘ experience: I don't think I've ever seen a hack quite as smooth as comex's JailbreakMe 3.0), and due to Substrate it is infinitely easier to intstall the one or two custom changes you want rather than thinking about choosing and installing a custom version of the entire OS or having to screw around with risky patch files or incredibly complex baksmali instructions.

I also used it to develop and learn the Objective-C on iOS. I didn't have a Mac at the time and didn't really have to money to buy one either. Eventually this got me into a 3 month job (sabbatical from my regular job) to develop a prototype on the iPad for a startup.

My first experience developing on iOS was SSH-ing into my jailbroken iPhone. Here are my notes on setting up the development environment but these are old by now and very probably not relevant anymore: https://www.dropbox.com/s/naq7763aximu8cx/iphone.org

If you are really interested I have a tarball with source and Makefile for you but it won't compile on recent toolchains I guess. (Also a bit of googling will get you examples as well.)

This is all thanks to saurik (who replied elsewhere in this thread) and others in the jailbreak community.

Also a lot of apps on Cydia were written using the GCC toolchain (at least initially, I'm not really up-to-date anymore).

I'm a sysadmin/devops, I don't need a root shell on my iPhone/iPad, what for? Maintenance? Which maintenance?

Of course it's not actually in stock, so carriers are charging £400 for it out of contract because they can.

If it's 239 in the UK unlocked, it would be very easy to just get it shipped to Greece via Amazon. I'll have a look, thank you!

EDIT: Do you have a link? All I can find on Amazon is this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/LG-Google-Nexus-Smartphone-Black/dp/...

which is 450 quid, which is 550 Eur...

A reseller is a person or business which buys goods only to sell them to someone else. Retailers fit in this category.

http://www.zdnet.com/retailers-rebel-as-lg-tries-pricing-nex...

In my opinion, people should buy devices that they can only afford and maintain, together with the apps associated with that device.