@dan131riley > they seem to have a pretty good record of trying to make it impossible for anyone--including Apple themselves--to retrieve personal information.
They have a good record of making it seem that it's impossible for them to retrieve personal information - but in reality, such service is certainly offered - but with a set process - it needs to be kept *secret* and requires *payment*.

It seems the FBI previously wanted to save a bit of the budget and asked apple to unlock an iphone in court without payment and of course apple said no (the FBI ended up paying a cracker group seemingly less than apple's typical rate to crack the PIN for them).


Apple has total control over all of their devices as they hold and control all the signing keys - meaning they can push any update they please at any time (with maybe a few days before it auto-installs) - meaning that even if iOS didn't contain spyware, they can decide that a certain device is going to soon contain it.

Of course apple is happy to encrypt data before it gets uploaded to "icloud" - if they want to look at it, all they need to do is instruct the device to send them the encryption key (via a backdoor, or a proprietary update (functionally the same thing)).