The problem is, Apple has to fight this now because once they've done this once, they're in a losing position when the government wants it done 800 more times.

Right now, Apple can argue undue burden. Someone needs to sit down, nop out a bunch of security measure in an older branch of iOS, add boot and installation tests that lock it down to a particular serial number in a way that isn't vulnerable to any easy spoofing, test it all, and finally sign it.

If they do all this now, the second time the FBI shows up at the door Apple can't decide to then start arguing undue burden. Any government lawyer could win the argument that Apple already did all the heavy lifting, and that merely changing the serial code checked for could obviously not now constitute an undue burden on the company.

Once they've started down this road it's just a slow frog boil of "obviously not undue burden" small changes to "here's a list of 500,000 potential terrorists whose data we may need to access. Push an OTA update to them that has bypassable security"

>The problem is, Apple has to fight this now because once they've done this once, they're in a losing position when the government wants it done 800 more times.

Since each of those 800 times will used after court issued a legal warrant, that is actually good.

Suffice to say, we appear to be operating off of entirely incompatible definitions of "good"

Which countries will be issuing these good warrants? All of them?

All except the bad ones. They'll be prohibited by statute from taking advantage of any of this.

That is until they for torture someone to get around it.