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The internets are full of walk-through guides and tips for jailbraking your iPhone. They gush about the benefits of jailbreaking without explaining many of the downsides. So here’s a counterpoint, from someone who has jailbroken and then un-jailbroken their iPhone. Not to say it’s not worth it for you to still jailbreak your iPhone, but you should have the facts to be able to make an informed decision.

1) There’s just not that many reasons to jailbreak anymore. Before the Apple App Store, you had to jailbreak your iPhone to get third party apps on your phone. In that time before time, the benefits of jailbreaking were totally worth the risks. But now almost every app that used to be available only on jailbroken phones is now available on the App Store. Sure, there are a few apps I miss from my jailbroken iPhone days (SBSettings, Backgrounder, etc) but in truth I don’t miss them all that much. In the end, jailbreaking my phone allowed me to waste tons of time fiddling with some settings and configurations I rarely used but it didn’t give me much added value over what the non-jailbroken OS already provides.

2) You can fubar your phone. In general, the non-approved apps from Cydia or Icy are well designed and won’t cause you any problems. But even the best intentions can’t prevent bugs, not to mention the danger of just plain shoddy apps. The net result is that installing or uninstalling a non-approved application, in rare cases, may cause your iPhone to crash or fail to boot. In these cases, the recommended course of action is either to restore to a clean firmware image and re-jailbreak or poke around your iPhone filesystem using SSH and fix the problem manually. Either of those sound fun to you? Me neither. This danger made me wary of installing apps from Cydia or Icy and isn’t that the whole reason to jailbreak in the first place?

3) Jailbreaking may introduce privacy or security problems with your phone. Some security researchers claim that jailbreaking your phone introduces more “entry points” for hackers (see Jailbroken iPhones – Security Risk?). Also, a few reports have surfaced recently about problems introduced by jailbroken apps. The most glaring was that a hack used to enable push notifications on jailbroken phones was actually sending your push notifications to the wrong people. Read about it on CrunchGear: Pushfix for Jailbroken iPhones caused Push broadcast problems. Say what you will about Apple and the App Store’s draconian approval process, but at least they do rigorous security and privacy testing.

4) You have to jump through hoops each time Apple releases an iPhone software update. OS 3.1 is rumored to be just around the corner. Each time Apple releases a new iPhone software update, users of jailbroken phones have to wait for a new jailbroken version to be released and then re-jailbreak their phone with the new updated version. I’d rather keep my phone un-jailbroken and just click the Update button iTunes.

5) By not jailbreaking, you can sleep easy at night knowing the Apple store will fix any problem you have. Jailbreaking your iPhone voids your warranty, which means that if you have a hardware problem with your jailbroken iPhone, you can’t take it into the Apple store to get fixed. Of course you can always restore your jailbroken phone back to it’s original condition and then take it in and then re-jailbreak once it’s fixed, assuming the problem doesn’t affect your ability to restore the phone. Just don’t try showing up at an Apple store with a pineapple boot logo on your iPhone or they will turn you away and possibly add you to a terrorist watchlist.

Summary: In the end, it boils down to how much time you are willing to spend fiddling with your iPhone. If you have ample free time and really enjoy customizing and tweaking (and restoring and re-jailbreaking), then I think the benefits you’ll get out of jailbreaking outweigh the risks. Or if you really just want to stick it to The Man, then more power to you as well. But I think for the vast majority of people, even the geeks among us who have been strongly considering jailbreaking their iPhone (as I was), it’s just not worth it.

We introduced “solid” foods to Eli when he turned 6 months old. Personally I think it’s ridiculous to call what we gave him “solid” food since there’s nothing solid about it. To be accurate we introduced “mush” to Eli when he turned 6 months old. But I digress.

We started Eli on rice cereal and then oatmeal and then carrots, peas and sweet potato. He seemed to enjoy the rice cereal and oatmeal until he got his first taste of carrots. Now that he knows food can actually have flavor he is no longer a fan of rice cereal and oatmeal. We’ve had moderate success mixing veges with the oatmeal. Eli also doesn’t care much for the peas and, having tried them myself, I can’t say I blame him. But much like his mom Eli continues to be a big fan of the carrots and the sweet potato. And last night we gave him apples for the first time and he ate the entire container, so I’m pretty sure he likes those too.

Eli got the hang of eating pretty quickly. Every now and then he will attack the spoon, spreading food all over his face. When he is feeling really mischievous he then sticks his hands in his mouth and then bangs his food-covered hands on the table, spreading food everywhere. But aside from these times, he is generally a good, fast, relatively neat eater. Introducing solid foods has done amazingly awful things to his diapers but I’ll leave the poop discussion for another day.

Here are some shots of Eli’s first meals:

Eli turned 6-months old this week! He’s changing so quickly it’s hard to remember all the things he wasn’t able to do just last month. He enjoys spending more time in his doorway jumper and exersaucer, watching the cats, as well as joining Jed and I for meals in his bumbo seat on the table. Eli now weighs 18 lbs 9 oz (65th percentile) and is 27 inches long (73rd percentile). Apparently his head grew too over the last 2 months as his head circumference is now at the 74th percentile.

This month we had visits from family members, college friends, and even Eli’s first non-relative babysitter. In terms of new skills, Eli is now able to roll over in both directions but does so rather reluctantly. His favorite place to do so is in his crib, particularly in the middle of the night where one of us has to go flip him back over so he can get back to sleep. He is also sitting up all by himself! We weren’t expecting him to be able to sit up alone so soon, but he seemed to have skipped the tripod stage (where they put their hands out in front for support).

To help celebrate his 6-month birthday, we started him on solid foods. So far he’s only had rice cereal and oatmeal, but he’s eating them like a champ! We’re looking forward to feeding him fruits and veggies this month. Eli also seems to be teething as he is now biting down on everything. Fingers and shoulders seem to be him favorite things to chew on. And, sleep, glorious sleep; he has been sleeping through the night – 10 hours straight – for almost a month now! Now if only Jed and I could go to bed on time we’d easily be able to get 8 hours in ourselves…

Here are Eli’s 6 month elephant pictures:

For more Eli action, check out Nicole’s smugmug site for pictures from July and pictures from the beginning of August.