Re: Why are people getting this so completely wrong?
It's because they are not getting it wrong - they can see beyond the smoke that you're still busy inhaling.
You can strip the Apple logo off this request, and even that it's about terrorists - the essence of this order is that it goes to great lengths to create an illusion.
It is asking Apple to develop a method that will help the FBI break the security of the iPhone, which is basically asking a commercial company with a successful product to commit commercial suicide.
But that's what you see. Behind the smoke is that fact that the US legal system is based on precedent, and that declares all exhortations that this is a one-off, never to be repeated, entirely exclusive, not sharable effort (etc etc) as absolute total bullshit - if this is successful, it established a legal template to ask for it again and again.
This was diagnosed pretty much the moment it was reporting, so I'm not going to repeat all that. Just note that Apple has now filed a deposition that PROVES this was not a one off - apparently this trick is tried in some 12 other places too.
The worst bit is that this means we've had a supposedly unbiased judge participate in an effort to hide the precedent setting nature of such orders, and that is a dangerous sign indeed as that seems to suggests a frankly questionable amount of collusion.
What you're looking at is a new attack vector in the Battle for the Backdoor, nothing less. Everything else is just fluff and misdirection.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
