I’m officially amused now with Apple’s latest move to tighten the noose around its iPhone-loving customers. Want to buy one? Fantastic! Paying cash? Get the fuck out of the store. Only plastic-wielders can buy an iPhone now. That’ll learn ‘ya.

Now in order to purchase one of these stupid things, you have to walk in with a credit card, and you had better only want just one or two. That last part amuses me — the company claims it’s doing this to stop resellers (because crushing all that “doctrine of first sale” bullshit is vital to a vendor-locked economy) who have the nerve to buy these phones (at Apple’s desired price … those miserable reselling bastards, actually paying Apple what it says those iPhones are worth), unlock them so that people who don’t want to use AT&T can still use the phone, and sell them to those people.

Does this make business sense to you? X million people use AT&T’s networks (or are eligible to). Y million people use (or want to use) cell phones in the U.S. and foreign markets. X is most definitely not a huge percentage of Y. Why in the name of hell would you intentionally restrict yourself to just dabbling in market X when market Y is beating down your door to get to play with your products?!?!

Most amusing of all is the notion that eliminating cash payments for iPhones will somehow stop resellers. Stupid bastards — now it’s easier. Do you know how easy it is to buy a stored-cash-value credit card? Do you know how cheap it is? It’s safer than carrying cash these days, too — now if you want ten of these things, you just buy ten stored-value cards with the exact after-tax sale price on them, hand them out to five different grunts, and have them each visit two Apple stores. With unlocking taking less than ten minutes (and being free), and the “markup” on unlocked phones being at least $50, do you really think this is too inconvenient for a net take of $500 profit for about an hour’s work spread out across five people?

Hell, I’d do that for a living if I could rake in $100 an hour full time

Apple, you’re dumb as a bag of rocks for this. AT&T, you’re a pile of stupid, selfish, greedy bastards with this “exclusive lock-in” junk. I don’t even want an iPhone and I think these two companies are treating their bread-and-butter customers like shit.

Carry on, iPhone hackers! Keep showing these morons why it’s stupid, stupid, stupid to try to restrict where people can use hardware they pay lots of money for.