When the vast majority of the devices you sell run on battery power, it makes far more sense from a battery life perspective to handle issues in hardware as much as possible.
For instance, try to find a processor aimed at mobile devices that doesn't handle video decoding in dedicated hardware instead of running it on a CPU core.
> given Apple designs their own CPUs they could add extensions for anything they need.
Indeed. They added an entire enterprise grade SSD controller.
> In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.
For instance, try to find a processor aimed at mobile devices that doesn't handle video decoding in dedicated hardware instead of running it on a CPU core.