Apple on Jailbreak Ruling: Go Ahead and Brick Your iPhone. See If We Care.

Sure, jailbreaking your iPhone no longer violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but that doesn’t mean Apple (AAPL) supports it. So if you want to modify your iPhone to run unauthorized software, you’re welcome to do so, but not without risk or consequence. As Apple reminds us today, jailbreaking voids the iPhone’s warranty, which could prove problematic if your tinkering bricks it.

“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience,” the company said in a statement given to Cult of Mac. “As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.”

So you’re not going to go to jail for jailbreaking your iPhone, but you may well end up at the Apple Store dealing with an unsympathetic tech. As Greg Joswiak, Apple (AAPL) vice president of iPods and iPhone products and marketing, argued during a rule-making hearing last year, “When you hack the OS and remove all protection, anything can happen….The OS runs everything. And this allows any app, regardless of its functionality, its reliability, or even its safety, to run.”