Part of it is just that Apple spent a bunch of time hiring the right people and making the right acquisitions. Another part of it is just that designing a CPU

Part of it is just that Apple spent a bunch of time hiring the right people and making the right acquisitions. Another part of it is just that designing a CPU with good single threaded performance is hard and costs a lot of die area and no one else in the ARM world was incentivized to do this - who needs a smartphone with that kind of performance (I know, I know - all of us, now)? But Apple also makes IPads which are kind of a bridge device - mobile and battery-powered, but also big and something people might want to do real work on. I’m also going to say that I think Apple is still alone among the phone manufacturers in recognizing that smartphones are software platforms, not simply hardware devices. I think they have a special appreciation for the enabling power of a more capable CPU.