I thought the same thing when I read it. If Apple can do this, then it's already a backdoor, and all the publicity of "Even Apple can't hack your phone" was fal

I thought the same thing when I read it. If Apple can do this, then it's already a backdoor, and all the publicity of "Even Apple can't hack your phone" was false. But it turns out this is an older 5C, not the new 5S and up. So those old phones were effectively backdoored. I agree that Tim Cook has spun it as if it's not a backdoor when clearly it is. Still quite a hard-to-use one though. It seems like they need the physical phone and maybe Apple's private key for signing updates. The idea that the act of writing software makes it insecure is silly though. The security doesn't come from no-one having made the appropriate changes to iOS. If it was, that would be security through obscurity and any motivated hacker or the FBI could modify iOS themselves. It must be about signing the update so that it can actually be installed.