No.
Public opinion was shifting further and further in favor of Apple the longer this went on.
So they admitted they could do the job without Apple.
This was never about gaining the capacity to learn what is on a phone when it is needed.
This was always about gaining the capacity to unobtrusively scan any phone at any time completely, on a whim.
No, this was all just a ploy. The us gov has had the keys to i phones for a long time. It gives apple market share for some other deal it cut with the feds. People are jumping to buy apple as they are “resisting” (not), which as a company has started to lag quite a bit since the lose of S. Jobs.
I never believed that the G-men ever needed Apples help. This to me is something far larger in the data collection game. Are we to believe that any of the alphabet agencies cannot come up with their own code or way to hack an iPhone?