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Want to jailbreak your Apple iPhone 5? Here's how.

Evad3rs has released an iOS 6 jailbreak that works with the Apple iPhone and iPad. 

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Reuters
A jailbreak for the iPhone 5 went live today. Here, an Apple employee distributes boxes of Apple iPhone 5 handsets in San Francisco.
  • By Matthew Shaer

A few months after the iPhone 5 first hit shelves, the team over at Evad3rs has released the first jailbreak for Apple's flagship phone. 

Jailbreaking, essentially, is the act of opening up your phone to non-Apple-approved apps and extensions. A "jailbroken" phone will still play well with iTunes and the Apple App Store, but it'll also allow you to get your hands on a lot of content that hasn't been vetted by Apple, including the kind of content available in unsanctioned (at least by Apple) app hubs such as Cydia. 

To download the iOS 6 jailbreak, navigate over to this Website; you'll need five minutes, a USB cable, and a machine running Windows (XP minimum), Mac OS X (10.5 minimum) or Linux (x86 / x86_64). 

So is the new iPhone 5 jailbreak legal? Well, yes, although Apple in the past has stated that jailbreaking "can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably." The bigger question may be whether you should jailbreak your iPhone. In a thoughtful essay published in 2011 in Slate, Tim Wu, who unlocked his own Apple device, admitted the process wasn't "for the faint of heart." 

There's some risk in jail-breaking – from voiding of your warranty to breaking your iPhone – but there's reward, too. 

"The worst thing that you can say about me is that I've messed with Apple's right to run its business exactly the way it wants. But to my mind, that's not a right you get in the free market or in our legal system," Wu concluded. "Instead, Apple is facing trade-offs rightly beyond its control. When people unlock phones, Apple loses revenue it was hoping for, but also gains customers who would have never bought an iPhone in the first place. That's life." 

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