Is this one of those rare moments where upgrading to the latest ios version isn’t a good thing?

Back when I did forensics, I got to use Cellebrite. While Apple was telling fhe world it had the most secure phone, we were hooking up iphones to celebrite and just... Reading them.

This was 2013, and it seemed obvious that there were keys involved, celebrite is good, but nothing breaks encryption that fast without a key in 2013.

I can only imagine what that toolkit can do now.

There was an exploit on you could bypass the bootloader essentially and run whatever you wanted at that time. They couldn't patch it apparently with software so it had to be replaced in hardware.

In theory after 2013 that shouldn't have been able to happen without decryption keys or brute force like you're saying

Nope

So Apple quietly fixed a nasty vulnerability reachable over the air in iOS 26.5, yet they made no mention of it in the security bulletin.

Ahh so they did fix it. Missed that line. Thanks.