Something that surprises me is that iPhone OS could boot in the first place without a working GPU. Do Apple include a software rendering fallback on these devices just in case the GPU is broken? It makes sense for a desktop OS to have one, but why on a mobile OS in release builds?
The original iPhone OS was developed on a separate team from the hardware one, and Jobs siloed them very heavily. It's possible the software team didn't know if they’d have a dedicated GPU. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
Hmm, the OS makes pretty heavy use of OpenGL ES AFAIK, so I would think that's unlikely.
dang: What is this a dupe of? It's a new blog post, part 2 rather than part 1.
I think that was an error. Sorry for the belated reply! I've removed the [dupe] tag now.