Competitor’s fans say (now) that phones are fast enough, no need for Apple to be 3 years+ ahead of their brands. That would be true if you never wanted to add any new features, which I’m sure the competition would love to see. Computational photography enabling the new cameras, machine learning, new health monitoring hardware, neural networks all depend on processing power and efficient use of resources, especially if you’re keeping most of the data on device. If your model is to send all the data to Google or Facebook’s servers for processing and slurping, then you obviously don’t need so much power.