This is much simpler, they wanted more sales of accessories to show higher sales revenue. Playing up the "eco-friendly" messaging, they're able to cut costs and avoid including a charger +headphones.

The changes forces most customers to buy either a wireless airpods or a new magSafe charger. This become an easy 'attach' sale for all retailers and virtually any sales person. Customers will be told that their device does not come with a charger and the apple authorized, overpriced charger is the best option to use with their new $700-$1K+ device.

This allows Apple to show stronger revenue numbers, even if demand for the iPhone is weaker.

Except many probably already have a gazzilion of chargers around the house. Or jusst some USB to plug the cable in. For the last 3 or 4 iPhones I had I did not even take the charger and the earbuds out of the box. Adds nicely to the resell value.

How is wireless data more secure than wired data?

I'm unclear how this works stop anything. Physical access is total access: there's a JTAG port in there somewhere.

There may be a JTAG port in between the glued-together battery and screen, but it's not going to be easy for someone who gets access to your phone for 5 minutes to exploit that.

JTAG's the extreme case though: it's not like most existing hacks have involved that level of access. It's been mundane stuff like just going in through the USB interface. If Apple eliminate the USB interface entirely, they're still going to have to make it available by some other means to service/update the device. Which means they'll be adding that software stack to wifi/bluetooth.

Your 2 attack scenarios are: device is in evidence lock up, and can b cracked at will (so a security company probably comes up with a kit for cracking and hooking them up, sells the service to LE) - or what happened with T2, where the software stack just gets exploited.

Since you'll still need all those management interfaces that currently are only on the physical port to be somewhere - well I'd put money on removing the port actually making the device more vulnerable. Briefcase of GPUs to crack wifi and rootkit a phone if you can get on the same network.

My sense is that existing physical access exploits have relied on legacy assumptions that shouldn't exist for wifi/bluetooth - hopefully no-one is building systems that give wifi devices direct memory access, or boot over bluetooth. They'll need some level of management interface, certainly, but that's likely to be something purpose-built and more tightly constrained.

Can't they burn a fuse to disable JTAG?

JTAG is very useful to test that this particular iPhone was manufactured correctly, so Apple doesn’t completely disable it. That said, Apple does have a hardware disable that removes the ability to access registers and memory via JTAG. One only has this ability with special development iPhones that have to be obtained illegally, in the US anyway.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/10/ktrw-journey-...

....Further incentivizing the fascists to figure out how to either force Apple to give them a wireless backdoor or figure out a wireless backdoor for themselves...