Back in 2008, Apple talked about availability of the iPhone 3G worldwide, and offered the following map:

(Pic credit: Iceland Review.)

For reasons unknown, Apple decided Iceland (and Greenland, for that matter) didn’t exist. My wife just discovered the same attitude prevails in iOS. Back in the heady days of iOS 3.x, Icelandic characters were readily available from the English keyboard: ð under D, þ under T and ý under Y. Now, they’re gone, forcing users to switch keyboard language to access them.

Fair enough, you might think, but think about it: Apple removed support from the standard English keyboard for no real reason; the characters were also useful to anyone needing to write about Old English/Anglo-Saxon; and the keyboard still retains a bunch of characters from other European languages that aren’t used in English.

So what’s the story here? Did Steve Jobs visit Iceland in 2007 and have someone recommend him hákarl and brennivín, without telling him what it was like, therefore sending the Apple CEO into a rage that he’s never recovered from? Or, more likely, has Apple just decided on a whim to remove support for something that people find useful, just because it can?