There may be a bigger problem for Apple than the public-relations fiasco over the "bricking" of handsets of users who've messed around with unauthorized apps. According to traffic on Apple's own iPhone forum, there's a growing cadre of users who are claiming they haven't engaged in any prohibited activity yet have still seen their iPhones locked up by Apple's new 1.1.1. software update.True, there's no confirmation, and the evidence is anecdotal. (See, even I've been Apple-whipped into semi-submission by all the Steve Jobs' acolytes who are telling me to stop whining because "people signed a contract and they knew they weren't supposed to play with their phones.")

Still, Apple's got to be taking notice of the most-read thread on their forum, which had 1,800+ views as of 1:40 p.m. on Wednesday. The subject line is the problematic "My unmodded iPhone was bricked by 1.1.1."

One user, who goes by the name of James Reza, posted this tale of woe:

"I am an Apple loyal since 1984 (I had an original Macintosh with an external floppy and no hard drive). When I connected my 2 week old, completely unmodded iPhone to sync today and was prompted to install the update, I did so. The update never installed and I have wasted three hours trying to get my phone working again. That in itself is unacceptable; that it is happening with alarming frequency to other legitimate users is inexcusable."

Another forum denizen posted this under the tag of "Evelation":

"I have an unmodded iPhone, been using ATT for two weeks, then last Friday attempted to update to 1.1.1 ... phone returned incorrect SIM card error message... went to ATT store and got a new sim card, still didn't work. Called Apple support today and they accused me of hacking the phone and wanted me to send the phone in for diagnosis. I've been without my phone for 5 days, it was even worse that it died right before I was going out of country for a conference, all of my contact info was in there. It was extreme frustration to say the least. I've been a loyal Apple customer since forever. The loyalty is deteriorating really fast. This is prompting me to actually hack the phone to get it working again. I am completely speechless."

While any update pushed down to thousands of phones is likely to have a few outliers for whom things don't go smoothly, one can make the reasonable inference that the reports of complaints we've seen circulating throughout the Web wouldn't be gaining any traction unless something is indeed fishy in iPhone upgrade land.

Add to that the fact that we're seeing demand-driven posts like this article, entitled "Downgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2," and this is pretty clearly a case of where there's smoke there's probably a wee bit of fire. ( There are also articles on rollbacks here and .)

By the way, since Apple has showing a propensity for removing posts about iBricking from its iPhone forum (like it did the other day, and in another case I documented), I've saved screen captures of the thread I quoted from above.)

P.S. Here are links to the oldie but goodie posts in the iBrick series: