[ibejoeb]

That sounds right. There are a few unanswered questions.

"[I]n 2015, an Apple technician was ordered by an L.A. judge to help police extract data from the phone's hard drive, according to the search warrant."

So, did Apply comply? If they did, or if they didn't, I don't think this has been reported anywhere.

Perhaps Apple complied and imaged the disk, and afterwards, LA needed a consultant to actually make something of it.

[oarsinsync]

There are various statements issued by Apple stating that they do cooperate with law enforcement when they can, and that pre-full-disk-encryption, they generally did.

That said, they sometimes go out of their way to make it inconvenient - if you want data provided on physical media, you have to supply a firewire disk

[braythwayt]

Yes. There is a huge difference between:

1. "Here's how to break the phone's encryption using available tools today", and;

2. "Here's a less-secure version of the OS, we'll use our digital signature to convince the phone to accept it."

If they ever do the latter, they can be sure it won't be long before they start getting warrants to push insecure OS updates to everyone named as a "person of interest," which seems to be everyone these days.

And the next time a Snowden leaks that Apple is sending insecure OS updates to more-or-less all iPhones, they have lost an enormous amount of goodwill and brand recognition.

A lot of people believe (rightly or wrongly) that run-of-the-mill Android phones are insecure because the carriers won't push updates, but that you can trust top-tier manufacturers like Apple to keep your phone secure.

The last thing they need is for people to say "Cheap Android, Expensive iPhone, there's no difference."