Well, technically, to drive sales. But you know th

Well, technically, to drive sales. But you know that. It is a good question though.

You also know that for basic operations, a Samsung S4 and S9 perform the same basic functions for practical purposes equally well, and that most of the processor enhancements are for video games and video/photo performance.

Put it another way, my iPhone 7 runs damn near as well as the new iPhone XS for nearly every application.

We're hitting a technology plateau in portable smartphones where the software needs to catch up to the hardware to drive performance.

We saw that two years ago with 4K TVs, basically everyone was doing fine with 1080p and a lot of the hardware wouldn't drive 4K apps well because 4K is roughly 4 times exponentially harder to push pixels to than 1080p, and all the hardware was designed to push 1080p.

Don't be too vexed over the hardware, when you look at the actual chips and designs, they really change very little between generations. You're talking a 5-10% performance difference usually.