[pj_mukh]

Is there a reason Apple can't take apart the phone and access the hard drive directly?

Maybe put the hard drive on a dev board of sorts. AFAIK, most cell-phones have dev board versions that the mfg's engineers use to test various component hardware revisions no?. There they can access it through root? I might be missing something here.

It would be hilarious if after all this, they find nothing on the phone. GENIUS!

[kozukumi]

The same reason they can't take the SSD out of my computer and put it in a dock to get at the data. The drive is encrypted with a key they don't know.

[pj_mukh]

Right! Hard drive encryption. Of course.

[nnx]

User data stored on an iPhone is encrypted using a key derived from the passcode, so somehow taking apart the NAND chips would not help a bit.