I'm a Mac actor Justin Long has a jailbroken iPhone
Famous geek actor Justin Long has embarrassed his former employer Apple after inadvertently showing on US TV that his iPhone had been jailbroken
Hollywood actor Justin Long may think Macs are better than PCs, but he obviously doesn't listen to Apple when it comes to jailbreaking.
In an interview on the Jimmy Kimmel show, eagle-eyed Engadget readers spotted that Long's iPhone carried a Cydia icon, a sure sign the phone had been fiddled with in a way that would make Steve Jobs rather cross.
We should point out Long doesn't actually work for Apple, as the Get a Mac ads were canned a while back. It's not illegal to jailbreak any more either, so he can do what he likes with his iPhone. It has to be more than a little embarrassing for the Apple suits, though.
Jailbreaking means you allow the iPhone to install apps that haven't been approved by Apple on its App Store. As Apple makes clear in a warning article, it can cause device and application instability, unreliable voice and data, disruption of services, and shortened battery life.
But Long may have an excuse. It has been suggested that the producer of the chat show was responsible for jailbreaking the device, as also visible was a TVOutTuner app -- this is required to mirror the phone's display on a big monitor, and also needs a bit of jailbreaking to download. Even if that's true, it can't be good for Apple to see people find out how useful jailbreaking a phone can be.
If Long did it, we're sure some will applaud him for sticking it to his former employer. It also shows off his geek credentials, which you may have first noted when he used an ancient Nokia 9300 smart phone to hack satellites and mainframes in Die Hard 4.0. Ah, now it makes sense.
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