Apple was smart to put in a hands off decryption that they cannot break. Its a free market and there is a demand for this. The Feds wanting the ability to decrypt any device or system here is another matter that right now I do not agree with.
Actually the NSA has some supercomputers that I believe can break any decryption. Its just that it takes time and hogs the computer and they want it to be easier.
An interesting case would be a top level criminal or terrorist who uses all non-decryptable Apple devices to communicate with his underlings. Would and could the Federales try to bully, shame, legislate against Apple into dropping their decryption policies?
No, DennisW, the current state of the art of supercomputers does not have the capability to break 256 bit AES encryption by any known means. The only known means of breaking such a cypher is brute force, trying every possible key until the right key is found. No known algorithm which can find that key by any known mathematical means . . . no one has found such a means. Your belief does not make it so. I am not going to repeat the proof and the math again, but even a supercomputer that can try 3 trillion possible keys a year. . . or even multiply that by 3 trillion times, you are still talking about time not even geographical time scale but on an cosmological time scale. If we stick to the 3 trillion possible keys per year capability of supercomputers available to us today, the time scale is currently 5.62 undecillion (5.62 X 10195) years, for such a supercomputer to try every possible key in a 256 bit AES encryption.
In other words, it is not even possible to do.