> 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.
This same heuristic can be applied all across the HN front page with good results.