I mostly agree, but it's not the only thing. Apple made a bunch of incremental improvements in the basics, this being one of the bigger ones. Reducing the move

I mostly agree, but it's not the only thing. Apple made a bunch of incremental improvements in the basics, this being one of the bigger ones. Reducing the movement of data, implementing common operations in hardware (there was mention of an object allocation being an extremely common client software operation that they implemented in hardware), bringing RAM physically closer to processors (reducing the die area and power budget needed for interfaces), higher bandwidth and lower latency paths to backing store--there were a lot of conceptually simple improvements. And perhaps the switch to a more regular instruction set helped somewhat. Apple could see a lot of performance being left on the table in pieces of varying size.