[matt4077]

If we turn completely cynical and tell everyone that all manufacturers are equal, we take away all incentives for them to actually try to protect their users' privacy.

Apple deserves some recognition for their attempts. At some point they were fighting several lawsuits seeking to protect their users, and were under massive attack by some politicians because one of the cases was a terrorist. That's quite risky – with the current political climate, being associated with one of the parties has the potential to cut your revenue in half.

The FBI may have ultimately gotten the data after buying a zero-day exploit, which is unfortunate. But Apple seemed to be winning in court at that time and the gov may have been quite happy to find a way to drop the lawsuits without losing face.

Apple also uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary, which may or may not be useful.