If that was true, Snapdragon, Kirin or Exynos designs would have caught up by now. The fact is that because Apple sells the iPhone for high profit margin and e

If that was true, Snapdragon, Kirin or Exynos designs would have caught up by now. The fact is that because Apple sells the iPhone for high profit margin and earns from the services and software sold on each iPhone, they can afford to stick a big, expensive chip in there. In contrast, profit margins on most Android phones are razor thin. Qualcomm has to design a chip that performs relatively well for as 'expensive' as the market can bear, as when their top chip is too expensive, OEMs will just build their phone with one of the lower tier Snapdragons. Once you adjust for transistor count, Snapdragons et al are much closer to Apple's A-series than you'd think at first glance. As for the M1, what shouldn't be discounted is the fact that Apple controls the entire stack, which means they could build in special features into it that together with Rosetta 2 make running X86 relatively performant.