I don't imagine the benchmarking software is being run through the App store process, so does the OS really make that big of a difference in the results? I'd think that if anything, the restricted nature of iOS would lower the benchmarks.
I just meant, we know very little about how the underlying technology we're testing actually works—how it prioritize cores and resources, how instructions get optimized under the hood, etc etc.
To be picky, that's the hardware, not the OS. And the same argument still applies: If we're flying blind, the benchmarks may underrepresent performance (although I think you're overestimating the opacity of the i-architecture).
