This is it. Apple follows a mobile methodology for their chip designs (tall: very powerful, large size cores) while Qualcomm, Samsung, etc follow an embedded me

This is it. Apple follows a mobile methodology for their chip designs (tall: very powerful, large size cores) while Qualcomm, Samsung, etc follow an embedded methodology (wide: many small efficient cores). On top of that, Apple has some great CPU engineers who've worked on the 68k and POWER architectures which they've leveraged against their ARM design. They're also the only consumers of their CPUs which allows them to design them against their use cases and optimize for them exclusively. While I'm a big fan of ARM in general, the only other chips really competing against Apple in it's performance + efficiency are nVidia's Denver cores and the ThunderX2; for similar reasons. Not that Qualcomm or Samsung's chips are bad by any means; just different.