In one respect, it invalidates one of the major reasons for using HLL's. People frequently argue that the principal reason for HLL use is to ensure maintainability. Products like the iPhone have a very brief market life, i.e. they're replace with something called a revised version, of just revised firmware but just as often a version with a different MCU and other modifications to the hardware, all of which makes the maintainability feature irrelevant.

I agree that, with an appropriately expert team of programmers, a product can be brought to market faster using HLL than using ASM. I also admit that in a case where the product life is so short as to make maintainability of code irrelevant, the likelihood of losing market share to a competitor who enters the market a bit later because he's made his product cheaper by making his code smaller, faster, or whatever, by using ASM, is probably irrelevant as well.

Yes, many times it's just a firmware upgrade, but, as with many cellphones, the pace of the high-tech toy market is such that maintainability is irrelevant. The next revision will often use a different (cheaper, perhaps, or faster, or having a previously unavailable feature) MCU and the current version is obsolete within 90 days of its release ... like the iPhone ...

RE