The chance of there being anything valuable on that phone is pretty slim. Especially when you consider how much the government is willing to spend on it. I was just watching CNN and Apple has apparently detailed what it would take before they would consider writing the compromised version of the OS. The reporter claims it would cost about $50 million and the government has apparently said "no problem, we can pay that". Ugh.
Well, for Apple to develop this software, they would insist on it being developed in a locked down facility that doesn't currently exist (what Apple has is in use). I think they have said it's only about $100,000 of developer time (so maybe 2-3 months of work), but the infrastructure that would be necessary for the work to be done in a way that doesn't risk any leaks is expensive.
That's an absurd point of view because the phone in question doesn't have strong encryption(1). If it did, there would be no way for Apple to trivially bypass it.
(1) Well it kind of does but by encouraging the use of an incredibly weak password it defeats the purpose of having any encryption at all really. If the San Bernardino shooters had used a real password we wouldn't be having this discussion.