That's somewhat over-simplifying their argument - the long and the short of it though was that Qualcomm has different business interests in chip-making (ie, bulk, cheap, quick to produce) than Apple - so Qualcomm is extremely unlikely to ever match Apple.

Of course if Google did in-house SoC design and had Qualcomm as a manufacturer then of course they could do it, but that's so far no happened and at that point it's Google's chip practically speaking anyhow.

One of the other theories I've heard is that it's partly because 4 is an unlucky number in Chinese, which is a major market. Thus why so many SoC vendors pushed to 8 core chips instead of taking those extra transistors and spending them on an L3 cache instead, which would have helped real world performance far more than the extra 4 cores do.

Probably not very true, but it's a fun theory. More likely is it just looks better on the spec sheet to have more cores & ever higher burst-only frequencies rather than the things that would have more bang/buck on more real world workloads like an L3 cache would. It's why you ended up with ridiculous nonsense like the Helio X20 & X30 (10-core SoCs with only 2 good cores and 8 low power ones)

Samsung could make a faster chip, but they pretty much have to put a qcom chip in us phones due to the qcom tax. So having a s8 with wildly different preformance doesn't make sense. For example the exynos chips can do 4k60 but Samsung limits camera app to 4k30 to keep it in line with us phones.

right, that's why the (presumably) dedicated chip for post-processing is a nice value add, as my comment said..

That’s a silly comparison. The iPhone’s calculator is sloppy programming, but it’s not indicative of any particular performance issue.

There are a bunch of neat real-time effects ones iPhones, and ARKit is pretty cool. But it’s really the opportunities that high performance offers for devs that matter!