Doesn't anyone worry about the security issues here?
Steve won't want people getting malware or anything. It's going to be very bad, when the iphone gets its first virus...
My understanding is that the iPhone flash memory is divided into two partitions. The first has the OS and built in apps, while the second stores your iTunes sync content. The disk mode will probably (wild guess here) give you access to only the second partition - so the wort a virus could do would be to zap all your data (which can be backed up by iTunes anyway).
I suspect that by the time the SDK comes out, the Apple bods will have rewritten the entire OS to secure it (things will no longer run as root). It continues to become more and more evident that Apple really rushed the iPhone out the door just to get the drop on the competition. Yes - they were working on the idea of some kind of phone for some time, but it looks like the final design did not congeal into its current format until shortly before the announcement (remember - even AT&T had not seen the "final" iPhone until it was announced). Apple then had six months to take a hacked together version and turn it into something stable enough to ship (and even then they didn't get everything working quite right). "Missing" features suggest that things were very rushed (and the fact that Apple had to pull people of Leopard to get the iPhone out by its target date is also indicative of crash development program with little testing outside the development group itself). This is also why no SDK was available at launch - no resource to futts around with non-essentials and the whole platform was still something of a moving target anyway.
Now, the iPhone is technically very good (not going to go into the marketing and lock in issues here), and represents a solid base on which to build not only new phones, but a whole family of mobile wireless enabled devices. What Apple have done is buy themselves another year to refine there mobile OS X offering by rolling out incremental improvements. Some (like mobile iTunes) will be introduced to generate new revenue streams. Others will be genuinely useful upgrades to the existing platform (cut-n-paste, Disk Mode, save-to-disk from e-mail and - perhaps - from the browser, flash - though I'm quite happy not to have this power-sucking feature, voice recording, video recording, faux-GPS from Google Maps, phaser capable of stunning Zune users at up to 50 meters - trick is to find a Zune user to test this on, expanded media browser, "pocket" iWorks).
