&gt;&gt; It&#x27;s unclear if you&#x27;re trolling, but assuming you&#x27;re not, the analogy doesn&#x27;t work because digital things and physical things behave in fundamentally different ways.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I fully agree that things are different because it&#x27;s physical over digital.<p>Lets say that the way a safe manufacturer could circumvent the lock on the safe is to build a custom tool that can rapidly try every combination much faster than any currently known method.  Such a tool could be reverse engineered (i.e. copied) after returning it.<p>I agree that copying software is far easier than hardware, but it&#x27;s the design of the tool that&#x27;s important, not it&#x27;s physical representation.<p>The only way I would agree with the FBI&#x27;s &quot;just this one iPhone&quot; statement is if they got Apple to crack it and they just returned the data but not the method.  Which of course they wont do.