Most people look as specs as the "standard" to compare phones. This is 100% the wrong way to go about it. I would be completely fine if the next iPhone ran just as quick as my current 4S. The .05 seconds faster it would be doesn't kill my day. Sometimes people are too caught up on "specs" and don't realize most times they aren't even that important.
The best example are people who buy the top of the line computers only to use them for web browsing, email, office and streaming video. You can do all those things on a $499 laptop.
I hope Apple focuses less on specs and more on user quality. Who cares if Android phones have better specs when they have x5 more bugs and crash x5 as often as iOS.
Hardware specifications
are important. They are really important. Why do you think Apple is
playing the hardware game. Yeah, that's correct: Apple is playing the hardware game. They act like they don't care, but they put a lot of attention to their hardware.
Let's just look at the iOS device announcements since
2010:
1) iPad (first generation)
2) iPhone 4
3) iPad 2
4) iPhone 4S
5) iPad (third generation)
I'm ignoring the iPods here, but let's not forget they also got big hardware upgrades in 2010.
1) iPad (first generation)
- Spending a lot of time on what a high-quality display the iPad had (1024 x 768, "high-end IPS technology")
- Spending a lot of time on the multi-touch technology
- Spending a lot of time on the A4 chip
-- Details about how Apple designed it
-- Details about other specifications (like clockspeed, they never did that before)
- Battery life (10 hours)
- 'Just' 13 millimetres thick
- LED backlight
2) iPhone 4
- Retina Display, highest pixel density at the time (326 ppi)
- Highest resolution display at the time (960 x 640)
- IPS technology and LED backlight
- Camera (5 megapixel)
-- Talking about lenses
-- Talking about the LED flash
-- Talking about 720p HD video recording and how magical it was
- Noise cancellation and how advanced the technology was
- Gyroscope
- A4 chip and how revolutionary it was to put this thing in a mobile device
- MicroSIM adaption
3) iPad 2
- A5 chip
- Most powerful GPU in a mobile device
- Dual core CPU, new architecture, 1 GHz
- Double RAM
- 10 hour battery life, yet much thinner
4) iPhone 4S
- A5 chip
- Most powerful GPU in a smartphone
- Dual core CPU
- Talking about the camera (8 megapixel)
-- Talking about how advanced the lenses are
-- IR filter
-- 1080p video recording
-- Video stabilisation
5) iPad (third generation)
- 2048 x 1536 display
-- Highest resolution display in a mobile devi
-- Colour accuracy near 100%
-- Talking about how advanced the pixel set-up is (to avoid interference)
- 5 megapixel camera
-- Same lenses as iPhone 4S (which are advanced)
-- 1080p with stabilisation
- LTE (which is noteworthy, since there is currently only one
real market: the United States - yet they're shipping iPads with LTE
everywhere).
- A5X chip
-- Most powerful GPU in a mobile device (not beaten yet)
-- 1 GB RAM
-- Talking about how advanced the technology is
And than we haven't even started about the new Macbook Pros.
I agree with you that you can't iOS hardware vs Android hardware (because we're talking here about the different operating systems), but hardware is important. And it is really important to Apple. For example, that GPU in the iPad 2: it was not necessary at all to improve the GPU, but yet they put in the best GPU available at the time.
Apple is very much about hardware. The trick is that they act like they don't care.
Remember the first generation iPad? Remember the iPhone 4? The iPhone 4 runs a thousand times smoother than the iPad, yet the GPU of the iPhone 4 is clocked lower than the GPU in the iPad. And the CPU in the iPhone 4 is also 20% slower than the one in the iPad. The problem here is the amount of RAM: 256 MB (iPad) vs 512 MB (iPhone 4).
As you can read, this extra amount of RAM has made the difference between a still reasonably good user experience (iPhone 4) and a just-about-sufficient user experience (iPad 1).
Apple is all about hardware.
Conclusion
People think they aren't playing the hardware game because they haven't shown a quad-core CPU, or a CPU clocked at 2 GHz or something like that. That's not where you must look: higher clocked CPUs won't always be better. Higher clocked CPUs use significantly more battery, but the extra power isn't always as much as expected.
Quad-core CPUs sound nice, but at this moment it's quite hard for developers to fully utilise quad-core CPUs; most developers still have problems with dual-core CPUs. So you'll only see advantages in apps from big companies (think Apple (like Pages, Keynote) and Google (Google Earth)) and in the OS itself. I believe Apple will make the move to a quad-core CPU, but I think they have other priorities right now.
What they'll do is looking for
architecture improvements. We're currently using the Cortex A9 architecture. The next-gen architecture is Cortex A15. I'll tell you something: a 800 MHz Cortex A15
dual-core CPU is
significantly faster than a
quad-core Cortex A9 CPU clocked at
1.3 GHz.
I think Apple is better of moving to the Cortex A15 architecture first:
everything will benefit from it (the OS,
all apps, rendering, loading, etc.). They're also looking to improve the sleep-wake time (so if the CPU needs to calculate something, the time it takes to go from 'active' to 'stand-by'). Or like they're doing with the A5 and A5X chips: putting in really powerful GPUs - which the competition aren't able to match at this time.
Apple is all about hardware. They're just not (immediately) following the trend of higher clock speeds and adding more cores. Why? Because that's not where you must look for
real improvements.