They made it impossible for the new versions of the hardware, I think. (The Secure Enclave, in the phones that have it, would delete the decryption keys stored <i>within it</i> after receiving ten incorrect auth attempt requests from the CPU. The Secure Enclave cannot be updated—as far as we know—to be brute-force-able.)<p>It&#x27;s just the old versions, before Apple started making privacy a political tentpole, that they could ever manage to backdoor <i>in this particular way</i>. That&#x27;s still bad—but what Apple are mainly worrying about is that this precedent would force them to aid the FBI in <i>other</i> act-of-creation ways, not just in ways involving introducing backdoors.<p>The FBI might compel Apple to, for example, build a monitoring and clustering service into iTunes Genius&#x2F;Apple Music to de-anonymize people through their music preferences; or they might request Apple build a facility to censor all messages travelling through APNS that mention the names of informants in active sting operations. Or they might compel Apple to build a secret CPU ring-0 elevation handshake into the A10 chip.<p>Even if the new generation of iOS devices was completely un-backdoor-able, and the usage of the old generation was effectively nil, that still wouldn&#x27;t minimize the FBI&#x27;s request. The FBI are likely much more concerned about all the orders they could give to, effectively, turn Apple&#x27;s engineering talent into a domestic-surveillance consultancy.