Sour Apple voids Warranty over Ringtone Roundabout

There are so many stories of bricked iPhones that I’m considering grabbing a bucket of mortar just to build myself a Manhattan penthouse purely out of them. I imagine the sun would glimmer nicely off of the brushed metal edges. But moving on… In the latest bricking story, according to iPhone Atlas, a man named Doug Rodriguez simply put his own ring tone on the phone, without purchasing a $1.99 version from iTunes, and found that his SIM card no longer worked. Worst $1.99 he ever saved. When he sent the phone back to Apple for repairs, Apple said it had “determined that the iPhone [had] been subjected to accidental damage of misuse, which is not covered by the warranty or an Apple service contract.” Rodriguez had never jail-broken, or hacked his iPhone in any way to allow the use of a different ring tone. Instead he just renamed a certain file that the iPhone uses to recognize its ring tones. But apparently that’s enough for Apple to argue that the phone is no longer under warranty. Anyone looking to modify their iPhones in any way should really think twice, even if it’s just manually changing the ring tone. I wonder if Apple’s warranty rules apply to custom paint jobs, too?