But you have (a) background tasks, (b) core iOS libraries being all multi-threaded courtesy of libdispatch and (c) AI being more commonplace which often is inferred across CPU and GPU.
Not to mention that Apple has been aggressively splitting up their operating systems into lots of independent processes.
Yes, but you hit diminishing returns pretty quickly there so it ends to coming back to Amdahl’s law. As the other work gets distributed and optimized, what users notice tends to be single core performance. This is quite noticeable on phones where people notice Android browsing performance being slower because that stands out the most – most people don’t talk about things which are fast enough, so you don’t get as much credit for all of the optimized multi core work as you get negatives for the slow single-threaded web experience which visibly runs faster elsewhere.
I’m aware, but that’s only partially true. Browser developers have been adding concurrency for years but the way the web is designed has inherently single-threaded parts and that’s why benchmarks track single core performance. Apple’s had a lead for over a decade because of this.