Looking back at Tim Cook's public appearances in the last few years makes the standoff with the government look almost inevitable.

Under [Tim] Cook, Apple has a new product line with the Apple Watch, but it hasn't generated the kind of excitement that the iPod, iPhone or iPad did. Still, Cook can't be called a failure. Under his leadership, the company released a larger version of the iPhone to record sales.

The relevant part of the First Amendment here prohibits the making of any law, quote, "abridging the freedom of speech." And it's pretty well-established that speech comes in many forms.

The FBI wants Apple to write software code to help it break into the iPhone. Apple doesn't want to say this. Andrew Crocker, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a digital civil rights group, says the government can't make you say what you don't believe. He looks to a Supreme Court case that began in New Hampshire.

Apple doesn't have to write code, which equals speech, when it doesn't agree with what the government wants to do. And it's not that the government can't make you do anything you don't want to do.

Even under Apple founder Steve Jobs, the company did emphasize values. Remember the Think Different ad campaign that used pictures of the Dalai Lama, Amelia Earhart, Mahatma Gandhi? But Jobs focused on the integrity of Apple's products.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and software has been treated as a form of speech ever since. So if software code is speech, Apple says the First Amendment also means the government can't tell Apple what to say.