The whole phone industry for years has been a "me too" Android industry following in Apple's footsteps and by that I mean phone manufacturers doing half-assed versions of what Apple had.

There was a great talk at Google about how the Nexus 5X was the worst phone they ever made. It was a postmortem and actually really informative. Like the thermals were bad (eg hot components together) such that the CPU had to go in low power mode when using the camera or the thing would overheat. Part of it was they just happened to use a bad die process (20nm IIRC).

The interesting part was how Apple's announcement of a 64 bit CPU totally shook the industry. Roadmaps were thrown out and half-assed 64 bit CPUs were put into the market essentially for marketing purposes (the "64 bit" bullet point).

Apple's ARM chips are actually pretty amazing and have mostly been at a sweet spot for performance vs battery life.

To be fair, I think Apple has gone off the rails in the last few years. The examples are numerous:

- The 2015 MBP butterfly keyboard (rumour has it this only happened to shave 0.5mm off the laptop height)

- The loss of Magsafe

- USB-C

- Force Touch (from a company that famously once eschewed the right mouse button for lack of discoverability)

- Face ID (what I'd give for Touch ID on the back of the phone). This was purely to make a bigger screen. As much as they talked about the false positive rate of Touch ID being too high the false negative rate of Face ID is way too high, particularly on an iPad.

- The Touch Bar

I really do think where Apple design went wrong was when there was no longer a Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive. A lot of the more ridiculous design fails seem to come directly from Ive (like the 12" Macbook).

But the CPU part of Apple is cutting edge.