Apple has taken the assault on iPhones as a personal insult, and, in an effort to stop modders tampering with the handset, they have adapted their new MacBooks and Macbook Pros to disable a common software tool often used to “jailbreak” the device.

According to forums around the web, iPhone and iPod Touch users who have naughtily unlocked their devices using the Pwnage Tool are unable to get their new Macbooks to recognise the devices. Instead the devices give a warning message when connected: “An iPod has been detected. But it could not be identified properly.”

Bizarrely, other Macs and Windows-based machines recognise the modded handhelds without a problem.

The move by Apple comes as hackers with the iPhone Dev Team cracked the unit’s latest firmware version.
This is just another example of the running battle between hackers and the company responsible for every word having a lowercase ‘i’ in front of it. Since the iPhone’s June 2007 debut, hackers have broke in, Apple have locked them out, Hackers broke in again, Apple locked them out…and on and on it shall go for ever.

As of yet, know one is quite sure what Apple have done. It would not be a great shock if Steve Jobs, Apples CEO, decided to stick two fingers up at the hackers and ruin their fun permanently for jailbreaking his baby. But why do it on just new Macs? One other theory is that the pwnage software has a bug.

There are also unconfirmed reports of the new iTouch’s coming with hardware changes that prevent them from working with another hacker program called WinPwn. Could this be the battle to end all battles over the coming months? Or will Apple just accept that their will always be hackers, and it can’t stop them easily.