[runjake]

Meanwhile, the internals inside that same casing have improved drastically, some might say stunningly, over the past few years.

Here's some of the things they've worked on in the timeline you mentioned:

- A10 Fusion high/low power cores with surprising levels of performance approaching desktop performance and even surpassing some low-end desktop processors.

- Solid state home button

- The Haptic Engine.

- Touch 3D

[TillE]

I can take or leave the gimmicks, but Apple's progress with ARM processor design has been stunning, year after year. For the past few cycles, their phone CPU has comparable performance to a good laptop from about 3 years prior.