Now, see, this is what I don't understand. Why is Apple worse than any of the other manufacturers? All these guys are putting wonderful hardware into beautiful little containers with completely ugly restrictions as to how you can use it. If you want to do anything useful with an iPhone, you jailbreak it. If you want to do anything useful with an Android phone, you root it. I don't even know what you do with a Windows phone, but I'm sure you'd have to do something against the manufacturer's wishes. What's the difference?

The only phones in existence that allow users to actually run their own software on them (without breaking the manufacturer's rules) are the N900, the N950, and the N9. Period. (I would be happy, even ecstatic, if someone could prove me wrong about this.)

So if you're not going to choose one of those three, I say the iPhone is as good a choice as any other. It has great hardware, and if you're going to hack the machine's OS anyway, why not give it a chance?