To this point, iPhone performance has grown by first doing their own silicon and then by offering more hardware blocks to do what used to be done purely in SW.

To this point, iPhone performance has grown by first doing their own silicon and then by offering more hardware blocks to do what used to be done purely in SW. Of course, they also rode the wave from 45nm to 7nm. As you look forward from 7nm, the picture is less exciting. Claims of 2x and 4x improvements will give way to 20% benefits from the hardware alone, and they'll have to work really hard on technologies like Metal to limit the amount of SW layers between an API call and the instructions in the chip. Making products that last as long as possible is good for the Earth, but without breakthroughs in semiconductor physics, the space is maturing. Software already ate the world, and must now learn to coexist with the remaining resources.