> Either all the senior engineers and PhDs working for Apple are idiots, or it’s harder than you think.

I was part of a team that rolled our own firmware update mechanism at Microsoft . (I didn't work on the replacement myself, the engineer sitting next to me did.)

And deeply embedded USB stacks w/o a heap aren't exactly uncommon, considering malloc is forbidden in a large % of firmware.

I'm sure the choice was made by a small team back when iPhone was still a carefully guarded secret inside the company, and it's stuck around since then.

The costs just outweigh the benefits.

Nothing to do with idiot engineers or the task being hard. They could be idiots _and_ the task easy. Some things just don't need to be done.