The government, according to Cook, has every right to force you to bake a cake for queers who want a "wedding cake", but no right to demand that Apple access the data in a phone used by murderous terrorists after the terrorists are dead and gone.
The only people they're providing privacy protection for are the friends and contacts of the terrorists, not anyone else, not the public at large.
Wait until someone commits a "hate crime" against some fudge packer and has an iPhone the prosecutor doesn't have a way to unlock. Apple will fall all over themselves to provide any assistance they can in order to prosecute whoever dares to insult fudge packers individually or as a group.
That's false. Apple has been taking a stand on customer privacy for years.
The FBI already has all of the call data from that iPhone. It was his WORK phone supplied by the County of San Bernardino. The call logs show that the only phone calls on it were to work related contacts, with a few, during working hours to/from his monster wife's regular phone, basically normal. The only email on the iPhone was the County business email. Texting was business oriented. The strong likelihood is the he did not do any terrorist oriented activities on that iPhone because it was owned by, and controlled by employer, and they could, at any time pick it up, download things from it, etc.
The terrorists did not smash it because they knew they had nothing incriminating on it. They may have kept it with them to use the GPS on the getaway or for directions to their nest attack target. If there was information incriminating for any compatriots, it would have been destroyed and sunk with the others.
I would also suggest another motive. Destroying a property that did not belong to him may have struck him as somehow immoral, in a twisted religious fashion. Killing is ok, but theft is not. He can destroy HIS property, but not his employer's property. That may be off the wall, but these are religious fanatics, and he has to be ritually clean to meet Allah. Killing is OK with his weird Moon God, but theft is not. It is also trivial to wipe an iOS device to Factory Clean status in just five minutes, with no data recoverable at all. The same is not true of Android phones.
The only people they're providing privacy protection for are the friends and contacts of the terrorists, not anyone else, not the public at large.
As for protecting others, you are wrong. There are 800,000,000 users of Apple iPhones who rely on the security of those devices. They keep their ApplePay, passwords, identity data, personal photos, many things they do not want revealed. They bought their iOS ecosystem because of that security guarantee. For Apple itself to "HACK" into the iOS protections and create the means to break that invulnerability, would destroy the trust and security those 800 million have come to rely on. Apple has spent billions of dollars and years of effort designing this break proof system, and the government is DEMANDING they tear it down.