I think the big difference is that US companies can meaningfully resist the US government if they choose to, and they often do. Chinese companies cannot.
The message to me from that case is clear—if the US government tells you to jump, you answer, how high.
There is no reason to believe that the NSA doesn’t have the ability to access iPhones [0]. Either through explicit help from Apple or otherwise.
Tim Cook’s stance was within the fiction of constitutional order. The FBI wanted to pretend that they couldn’t access the phone and bully Apple to give them access. This is to:
1. Legitimize their own access 2. Be able to, more easily, use the courts to punish someone (instead of droning a foreigner)
That last one is important. The DEA is known to use (unconstitutional) parallel construction to prosecute drug smugglers. If they have legitimate access to your phone, it’s easier to pretend that they obtained their evidence legitimately.
Tim Cook also has an interest in maintaining the aura that iPhones protect your safety. There’s no reason for you to believe that w/out having the source.
[0] or do you believe that no one working on the iPhone has secrets that the NSA can’t leverage? Or that the richest security service can’t manufacture custom chips as needed to clone the devices SSD? Or hasn’t capped the chips in the iPhone already? Or run it through the most through fuzzer?
That doesn't seem to be the case but the narrative. There were enough leaks, document dumps, and whistleblower revelations to dismiss this narrative.
Sure, for the US having competition is a problem but sometimes the US citizen should zoom out on Maps and Google some labels they see. Literally, most of the people do not live in the USA and you can confirm that by Googling labels in the maps, things like "France", "Germany", "Turkey", "Azerbaican", "China", "Japan". You will notice that these are lands that are somewhat similar to the USA but are not the USA but using the stuff made or operated in the USA.
For people looking from that part of the world, the "Chinese are spying on us" panic is met with "Oh really, that's so bad. Poor thing" level of simphaty.
This ideation is moot if there are members of the US government on staff, committed to 'finishing the patriotic mission' of their spook-agency masters.