In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes.

I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise.

To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind).

On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.

> In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes.

Well, except Android :P

My phone runs a build of AOSP that I compiled myself. I can go change the source code to do whatever I want (and I do). It's pretty cool that that's possible IMO. To be fair, the drivers are closed-source

Reading this comment, one would think Apple devices are very power efficient at the cost of running little in the background. In my experience, iOS has terrible battery life in the default mode, which is background app refresh enabled, and in general apps struggle keeping their state in the background, which is something that many people complain about on the internet. So the worst of the two worlds.

To get good battery life out of a device, having complete software and hardware integration is key. That's the PC blessing and curse, having to support all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, RAM, etc from many different places.

When you just have to focus on a handful of hardware platforms and when you own the hardware and software, this becomes much, much easier.