This whole thing has an odd smell about it to me and I don't think we're getting the full story. The iPhone has a 4-digit passcode, any computer could run through all the possible combinations very quickly, but if you enter the wrong passcode 6 times in succession the iPhone disables itself. If it's been synced with iTunes or the iCloud or a PC you can reset it to factory specs and recover, that erases everything on it and restores its contents to whatever they were the last time it was synced. But you need passcodes to do that too. What the FBI seems to want is for Apple to insert a back door into the operating system and update the OS on the phone in question with it, and that Apple is refusing to do. But you can't do that without the passcode either. Seems to me that if you don't have the passcodes, for the iPhone or iTunes or iCloud or the PC, you're hooped. Possibly Apple's engineers know some way to crack the passcode, but they may not. Frankly I vote with Apple anyway. It's clear from the journalist Glenn Greenwald's book "No Place to Hide" (he broke the Edward Snowdon story) that the security agencies of the U.S., the U.K, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, are engaged in warrantless, suspicionless wiretapping of everybody they can, and I think Apple is right to refuse to be part of it. Microsoft sold out a long time ago, Windows 10 is quite openly spying on you, it says so plainly in the EULA and I've little doubt all that telemetry and monitoring stuff was inserted at the behest of U.S. security agencies. It was also pushed out as "Important updates" to Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, so I switched to Linux rather than update.
