The iPhone story continues to unfold at breakneck speed. Since I last thought about buying one, we’ve gone through the initial-rush-to-buy era, the third-party-applications era, the SIM-unlocking era, the drop-the-price-by-$200 era, the iPod Touch era, and (most recently) the enrage-the-hackers-by-disabling-third-party-apps era. Elapsed time: less than four months.

(No, I haven’t got one yet. Waiting this long has already saved me $200 and increased my options!)

Mark Pilgrim claims not to understand why so many techies are obsessed with hacking the iPhone:

I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

It’s easy to claim that the iPhone “just works” if you live in the United States. For anyone else in the world, the iPhone is broken. It’s not mere hyperbole when European hackers claim that they are trying to “fix” the iPhone.

And the hackers don’t want to give up the “Just Works” factor – they want to tweak it, by adding a couple of extra apps here and there. It’s precisely because Apple’s platform works so well that so many people prefer cracked Apple hardware over other companies’ open platforms.

What are the alternatives? Reviews suggest that you can get much of the iPod Touch functionality from a Nokia n800, which runs an open Linux-based OS. But the Nokia costs more, has dubious video-playback speed, lacks the scrolling or pinching interface of the iPod, has a much less elegant design, and doesn’t work with iTunes. And, of course, it’s not a phone. The OpenMoko is a phone, but at its current rate of progress it might not ship before the Apple/AT&T contract expires four years from now. (The latest news: it is finally possible for one OpenMoko to call another. This is impressive work for a distributed open-source team, but it won’t be competing with the iPhone in this decade.)

The other reason to want third-party iPhone apps is greed. There are millions of iPhone users, so a successful iPhone app has a huge potential market. A successful OpenMoko app is worth exactly nothing at the moment.

Having said all that, I agree with Pilgrim’s main point: if Apple wants to run a closed platform, it’s their choice. It’s hard to argue with the success of the iPod, which (apart from an energetic minority of RockBox users and a slightly larger minority of Linux users) runs in a closed software ecosystem. The iPod works so well because its designers refuse to offer too many confusing choices. It really isn’t intended for hackers. It really is intended for everyone else. Those of us who don’t like that will either have to relax or devote our energies to a more hacker-friendly hardware platform.

I’m leaning toward the “relax” option in this case.