Imagine if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of people who waited for the iPhone to be released, and you ended up buying one. Although you were pretty satisfied with the product, you got upset with Apple, and sold it a few months later.

Despite the fact that the iPhone has extremely high levels of customer satisfaction, no product is perfect. But why would someone who likes their iPhone decide to give it up?

That’s the question I asked on the tech show this week, when I talked with former industry analyst Joe Wilcox. Although he covers Microsoft these days, Wilcox owns Macs, and has always had a soft spot in his heart for Apple. But they did something that rubbed him the wrong way, so he sold his iPhone in protest.

So what did Apple do? Well, it seems that one of the iPhone updates had the side-effect of bricking — or disabling — units that were unlocked through one of those third-party jailbreaking programs. Now, if you bought a hot-selling gadget for $599 or even the reduced price of $399, I can understand being upset of it’s turned into a door stop.

But what if your phone was never affected?

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 7:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple, Customer Satisfaction, Gadget, Hundreds Of Thousands, Industry Analyst, Iphone, Joe Wilcox, Microsoft, Newsletter, Night Owl, Owl, Protest, Third Party.