Clearly Apple's security has market value but that needs to be balanced against the benefits to society as a whole. Just restricting this to US law it seems Apple is not defending an existing right to privacy of the "man's home is his castle" sort. Those have been limited from the beginning by warrants and other acknowledged mechanisms of government to poke its nose into people's private affairs in the interest of the general welfare. The "right" that Apple is defending seems new and much more absolute--that you may possess devices may not be opened under any circumstances whatsoever.

The question of whether such rights exist is separate from the question of whether breaking into one device threatens security of all others. If true that seems to call into question the assumptions on which data protection algorithms are based. In other words, assuming you can create truly unbreakable encryption and it only works if there are no backdoors, is that really a data protection strategy that meets the needs of society as a whole? You could argue it's flawed even if the mathematics work perfectly.