You don’t seem to be paying attention to the words “vertically integrated” in my question — which were the whole point of my question. Apple creates both the O

You don’t seem to be paying attention to the words “vertically integrated” in my question — which were the whole point of my question. Apple creates both the OS and the hardware for their phones. So why shouldn’t the hardware microcontroller firmware for the hardware they create (or commission and constrain the design of), run as one or several RTOS blobs that ship as part of the OS on one or several shared MCUs? Let me put it this way: in x86, the motherboard has a power controller, but the CPU also has its own power controller. But on a vertically-integrated SoC system, I would expect there to be only one power controller, that controls power for the CPU, the other cores on the SoC die, and the various other components on the logic board. And I would expect that power controller, whether standalone or integrated into the CPU, to be running first-party code written by the system integrator (who is also the designer of the logic board, the SoC, the CPU in the SoC, and the power controller itself) rather than running code written by some vendor who was writing it in a “this chip could be used in many different builds, so it must be designed defensively for badly-integrated systems” manner.