Wired: I'm trying very hard not to, but I'm afraid I will mention the iPhone at some point in this column. This is because it is a federal obligation for US tech columnists to crow over their model or frown over its impact.
Instead, I do promise to be somewhat elliptical about it and begin - somewhat bitterly - by talking about my old and battered Apple relic, made in an age when the company was known for making laptops, not mobile phones.
Actually, my laptop isn't that old; nonetheless it's long been surpassed by Apple's regular hardware "bumps" to its line. Out of the many bonuses that lucky and affluent Mac laptops purchasers after me enjoy, one of the most useful is a magic power of hibernation.
That's when your computer is on its last watt of battery power, but selflessly uses it to dump all your current work on to hard disk before giving up the ghost.
When you recharge the battery enough to let the machine reboot, the first thing the laptop does is pull all your old suspended files from disk, and act as though nothing has happened.
Amazingly, old Mac laptops didn't do this: they'd go into suspended animation, but if you ran completely out of juice, your work was lost. For this feature, you'd have to spend a few grand on a new laptop. Or did you?
As it turns out, old models of Mac could use this feature but for reasons best known to themselves, Apple had never turned it on. Tap a few obscure commands into an old Mac's terminal window and the feature from the future would magically reappear.
It's this kind of user-driven sneakiness that keeps me interested in the home computer.
The truth is that the nature of software and hardware manufacture, as well as the economics of price discrimination, mean it's often the case that your computer's seller will sell you short on your PC's power.
In software, it used to be the case that you could turn a cheap home version of Windows into the more expensive fully-fledged server version with a few unofficial configuration changes. Computer enthusiasts called "overclockers" have long known how to eke out faster performance from microprocessors by overriding Intel's limits on how fast its chips are supposed to run.
Perhaps the most audacious example of this was a short-lived independent project this month to restore the glory that was old Microsoft. Back in 2003, what would eventually become Windows Vista was released in an incomplete beta form so developers could see what to expect. As it turned out, that incomplete preliminary version - called Longhorn - was the last we would see of some of the promised advances of the new version of Windows.
In 2004, Windows' project leader Jim Allchin, fearing delays, cut down Longhorn's feature list. The beta versions were set to time out years ago, but Longhorn fans hacked the software to run much longer. Recently, one hacking group even began faking some of the prettier aspects of the real, launched, Vista to make the older beta more usable.
Microsoft stomped on this "Longhorn Reloaded" project pretty quickly; but it just goes to show how much you can add or change to an existing product with a bit of ingenuity.
The developers currently throwing themselves against the iPhone's defences right now will have a tougher job. Apple and its mobile phone partner, AT&T, have ensured that, unlike Mac or PCs, the iPhone is sealed from tampering. In particular, there's no way to unlock the iPhone to work with other mobile phone providers (including, at time of writing, any in Europe).
But the iPhone's inflexibility is only skin-deep. Underneath its shiny exterior runs a general purpose computer just like a standard desktop computer or a laptop: it even runs a cut-down version of the Macintosh operating system. If the enthusiasts can break through the outer locks, they should be able to get the iPhone to do anything that a computer can do: run Linux (good), run viruses (not so good), or even unlock the phone from its mobile phone provider.
They even have some legal protection for doing so; the United States's famously harsh Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) can potentially be used (misused, some would say) to prosecute and punish the publishing of re-inventable gaps in the iPhone's design. But in a temporary three-year exemption, the US Copyright Office said in 2006 that phone unlocking was an explicitly permissible purpose under the law.
AT&T have, it is rumoured, negotiated a five-year exclusive deal with Apple to control with them how the iPhone is used. Three years seems plenty of time for coders to unlock the iPhone, and let the most famous Apple product yet exceed even the dreams of Steve Jobs.
