Although Apple most definitely still leads on these factors, I think battery life, general latency/responsiveness of doing daily tasks, reliability, etc, are more important than some random coremark.
Unfortunately iPhone can't do that so who cares about the better Geekbench score...
Can I still put it on my nightstand at 10pm with 15% battery and have my alarm go off at 8AM with 8-9% charge remaining? Cool, don't care how fast it benchmarks.
Android itself doesn't do that, but much like buying a PC, it's hard to stop manufacturers loading it up with cruft.
The gap was never that big, it was more the software that was running than any hardware issues.
No, it really was. I wasn't hallucinating stock Android tablets dying over long weekends while iOS tablets would still be usable for testing without needing to plug in, after three weeks in a drawer. Or the phones needing a daily charge if you barely used them, while Apple phones could go 3-4 days under light use. There were no exceptions to this in Android land.
[EDIT] Incidentally, yes, I agree it was largely a software issue—but at the OS level.
Disable all the software crap and there was no real difference. You think it was more internal to the OS, and maybe part of it was, but even with just ending all the crap that fixed things.
We agree there were no significant differences in hardware though, and that was my point.
I would say no, but they are a means to compare raw performance between phones.
Which isn't the best metric, but it's one of them. I mean at some point, Samsung was caught fudging the numbers, overclocking or disabling thermal / power saving options when it detected a benchmark app running.
So for their customers, or customers comparing phones, benchmark results do matter, to the point where it became a marketing tool. I don't think that's the case anymore though.