1) Much as some would wish otherwise, Apple does not make the law. They cannot “legally brick your phone.” Read the discussions around that time — it boils down to this: if one of Apple’s updates bricks your phone, and you have modified your phone or firmware, they are under no obligation to honor any warranty or service claims. That’s it. Apple has no super-legal powers to come in and tamper with your phone under any other circumstances. (Of course, case law can change, and the first “remote kill” of an application will be good legal theatre.)
“You own the phone. Not the program” — you might wish to take a look at Krause v Titleserv, the only U.S. case on SLAs and EULAs which has bubbled up this high to date, in which the 2nd Appellate Court rather decisively ruled against such provisions in SLA or EULAs. Krause is one reason many observers think software makers have not purused EULAs, because they do not want to establish further precedents against them.
If Apple wants a consumers “word” that they have only leased the rights to use the software “as-is” under their conditions, they have to enumerate those terms prominently in a contract that can be viewed and agreed to by both parties before the purchase is made. If Apple wants to abrogate consumer rights established in Section 117 of the Copyright act and upheld in Krause, they had better explain why that established precedent does not apply; otherwise, those rights are assumed. To date, they have made no such attempt, other than to re-assert the claim.
2) Still, I can agree with the gist of your moral point, because I agree with you 100% that if you jailbreak, you should accept the consequences. (For the record, my phone is not jailbroken.) Just because you have the legal right to jailbreak does not mean Apple has any obligation to help you or support you. On the contrary, the contract is quite clear on that point — Apple provides software and support under certain conditions and for a certain period of time, and, if I venture outside of those conditions, I am on my own. Once I buy my car, I can replace my gas engine in my Taurus with an electric engine. However, if I did — or, heck, even if I simply modified the dashboard software — Ford would rightfully laugh in my face if I tried to claim warranty repairs. If I jailbreak my phone, and an Apple update subsequently bricks it — that’s not their problem. Caveat emptor applies to hackers, as well.
However, and this is the crucial point, even if Apple were to produce a legally binding, airtight “no hacking” contract that each iphone owner were to sign in front of witnesses before each purchase, and I were to hack my phone anyways, I would be guilty, at most, of BREACH OF CONTRACT. This would be a civil dispute between two parties. If I do decide to hack my iphone, Apple is fully within their rights to tell me to kiss off and refuse to honor their end of the contract. They cannot and should not be allowed to do anything other than that, unless they can show my individual act of hacking caused them material damages. Simply put, it would not be a “illegal,” as there has been no crime committed.
Apple understandably may not like it, and you may not like it, but that does not mean the law has changed. Software modification for personal use IS a right EULAs cannot take away (at least in the US and Finland), and Jailbreaking is NOT illegal.