This analogy fails. Is Apple the criminal? Is Apple being accused of terrorism? Why is your locksmith justified in breaking into Apple, even with a search warrant? Apple has done nothing wrong, so why issue a court order against Apple?
Apple is the locksmith for the phone.
Like the locksmith, Apple would and should help the feds open the phone as long as the feds have followed due process and got a search warrant. Apple could set the number of password retrys to unlimited which is what I heard that the feds asked for. I don’t think that the feds were asking Apple to put a hidden port in their general software release. That, I would be very worried about.
By examining the specific evidence in this case, they can get into an iPhone.
By going after Apple, they hope to get into every iPhone.