All you 1337 kids who hacked your iPhone, be it by installing unsupported third-party apps or going “all the way” and rocking a T-Mobile SIM card, be warned—Apple may not play nice if the phone runs into problems. As the story goes, a guy hacked his iPhone so that it worked on T-Mobile, then started experiencing camera problems. When he went to an Apple store to have it fixed, the Apple employee told him (I’m paraphrasing here), “Dude, you’re screwed. You warranty is totally fsck’d because you’re on T-Mobile. Sorry.”
The story does have a happy ending, believe it or not. After much wrangling with the store’s manager, Apple agreed to a return. Too bad the guy had to pay a 10 percent restocking fee.
The moral of the story is to hack your iPhone with the utmost of caution. Or to not even bother, but I understand the urge to do it “just because.”