Thanks for your insight on the physical/engineering side of things.
Since when have TLA government agencies cared about cost, haha! Heck, this is about countering terrorism. Outside tech savvy circles, the court of popular opinion is probably against Apple.
LOL! For sure. I should have, and meant to say this is relates to what the author of the article said, not what the government said. My impression of the article was the author made it sound like it is super difficult and far out science to do what labs all over the world do on a daily basis and Apple can easily do this.
Honestly, if Apple can take the phone and easily hack it, as the author suggests, that would really bother me. It should bother all of us if Apple, or any company is selling us products that they engineered a way for them to be the only one's who can hack it. That implies nothing, including government secrets, is remotely secure.
I understand that the government would want to use Apple's expertise to hack the phone. In that sense, an easier out for Apple would been to state that they can't (easily, which I would hope they can't) hack into the phone, but they could use their expertise of the product to assist the government to get information out of it.
In fact, it is much easier to hack something like this, using any technique, if you have an intimate knowledge of the design. For instance, the government could have went to the designer and manufacturer of the memory chips to get information that would help deprocess and get the contents out with much less work than blindly going at it.
