Jailbreaking an iPad is a painless process with Absinthe
As I told you last week I was tasked with the job of locking down 60 iPads for use in a school. I was very unhappy with the options Apple gives you for locking them down out of the box. After talking it over with my partners, we decided to go ahead and jailbreak one of the iPads and see if we could get it to do what we wanted. So this morning I set about to get one done and see how it works.
Now I am no stranger to hacking and modding Android devices, but have never had the opportunity to do the same with an Apple device. I was actually very excited to be able to experiment with this. I had heard about the Absinthe method of jailbreaking, and since I didn’t know of any others, that’s the one I decided to use. After a quick Google search, I found their website, and downloaded the software I needed. Now I did this all on a Macbook at work, so I can’t speak to the process on a Windows machine, but the instructions were the same.
The instructions were very simple. Download the Absinthe .zip folder, extract the contents, and run the .exe that was inside. That’s it. When you execute the file, the program opens up and checks for Apple devices attached to the computer. It immediately found the iPad I had attached, and verified it was running iOS 5.0.1. I clicked the Jailbreak button and away it went. A few minutes later the iPad was jailbroken. All in all a pretty simple process, and one I plan on replicating 59 more times in the coming week. I see this as a great and fairly easy way to be able to install apps that either Apple banned, or decided they weren’t good enough to be put on the Apple store for one reason or another. There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of great new features you can use on a jailbroken iPad that Apple won’t let you do on a stock one.
Now of course this also needs to come with a warning. Jailbreaking, or rooting, a device can be dangerous. Just because I had an easy time doesn’t guarantee that your experience will be the same. You jailbreak or root at your own risk.
[Absinthe Jailbreak]
