are you posting this from bizarro world? apple is the one tech company that does not advertise tech specs. they mention them in the keynotes and move on. as if you ignored thousands of articles about this very fact. amazing.
Apple makes a really big deal about their cores and GPU, as they have every right to (they're pretty great). Quite aside from their keynotes that focus extensively on this, on the product page you learn, right near the top, about the A8 64-bit processor and M8 coprocessor, as if these facts have any relevance to an end user. They're bragging points. Apple talks about their 64-bit advantage ad nauseam.
They absolutely brag about their chip. They boast specs (as they boast "retina" displays and thinness and grams and materials).
Completely agree.
As far back as I can remember (Apple iMac G3) they've been touting their processors and architecture as being superior to other manufacturers, and one of the key reasons you should be using their hardware. So your comments are right on point, and something that's easily lost when most people only see is their advanced design chops.
What Apple doesn't do, is release products that compete solely based on these hardware specs. Their approach is "yeah it's fast enough, but it's also beautful etc."
Life's too short to use ugly crap.
They tend more than other manufacturers to boast brands and subjective description rather than the base specs -- "retina" rather than PPI, for instance -- but its true that they do sometimes boast specs.
They'll brag about their (completely meaningless) processor name (A8), but won't spend as much focus as others boasting measures like GHz or core count, etc. -- IOW, they don't spend a lot of focus on things that you can meaningfully compete with and compare across vendors.
Because they are selling magic and brands, not concrete features.
And because it's completely pointless to sell concrete features for certain components. If they boast the Ghz number it will be relatively easy for competitors to produce higher figures. Ghz don't mean anything unless you take into account all kind of details (architecture, throttling...) that no one except really detail-oriented reviewers will go through and that will bore 90% of the users. Hence the bragging on the name.
Erm, comparing frequency and core count is unhelpful, as you can see from the benchmarks in the article. The A8 is generally faster than the current Qualcomms, but has a far lower frequency and half the core count. Apple probably don't want to fall into the same marketing nightmare AMD did, where low-frequency high IPC Athlons competed against high-frequency low-IPC P4s.
I really am curious.