Industrial advancement isn't just building on knowledge. It's building on infrastructure. You couldn't go back to the stone age and produce steel, because the infrastructure for creating steel simply didn't exist. There were no iron mines, no foundries, no skilled blacksmiths. You could speed up the process, but you'd still be dead before the first steel sword was forged.
Likewise, the infrastructure for building iPhone components didn't exist in 1991. The A7 is built on a 28nm process. The 486 in 1991 was shipping with (I believe) a 0.8 micrometer process. So the infrastructure of the time was three orders of magnitude away from being able to build this chip. And this says nothing of the other components which faced similar technological hurdles. You couldn't make all these hurdles go away. Building up major infrastructure takes time, and no amount of knowledge can reduce that time to zero.