You could blame them as well, it's just a lot less relevant to the U.S. smartphone market (where iPhone has the highest market share AFAIK) since everyone is on

You could blame them as well, it's just a lot less relevant to the U.S. smartphone market (where iPhone has the highest market share AFAIK) since everyone is on Snapdragon here. As for Qualcomm and Apple being on different release cycles...that's exactly the problem! They're 6 months behind AND still have worse performance, plus due to their deal with Samsung, it's going to take even longer than that for any other manufacturers to ship devices with 845. As another comment said, it's not really going to be profitable for any company to try and compete with Apple on this. Which is why if it is going to happen, it's going to have to be done by someone like Google who has a vested interest in it beyond profitability from the chips themselves. If ARM reference designs can't keep up with what Apple is doing, and nobody else is willing to invest to go beyond them, Android will fall behind in the high end of the market.