Ah, well I'm sure Apple will be happy to know they're wasting money investing in a high-end SoC division. And I'm sure they would be even more happy if every other OEM agreed with you so that they could beat them ridiculously on HW specs without investing too much in them. A 50mm² application processor on 40nm costs about $15 - and in Apple's case it probably only costs about $8 given that they don't have to pay for anyone else's gross margins. Do you really expect them to try saving $5 per phone on a $500 device after investing this much in their SoC division? Or do you expect everyone else not to try competing with them on SoC specs despite it remaining only a small part of the BoM?
It seems you partially misunderstand (on purpose?) or maybe I was unclear.
Of course there will be advantages to efficient integration - I wouldn't underestimate those $5 saved on 100 million devices. You know as well as I do that those $500 are not profit. Another $5 on their margin per device from every iPod/iPhone/iPad is significant. Additionally, there will be advantages in terms of power control = battery life = customer satisfaction. AND they keep control and give themselves options for differentiation in the future. Of course it makes sense for a player of Apples size and ambitions to invest in their own SoC know-how.
So - I gave the mechanisms I see for why hardware specs will diminish in market importance.
Where are your arguments for why they would increase?
Btw, there are other reasons I didn't bring up for assuming that additional hardware capabilities won't get increasingly important in the marketplace. Most important that there are no applications that require much more than we already have, and we
know that, because there are no such applications in widespread use even on PCs! (There are low volume exceptions, sure, but even of those, few would transfer to a 4 inch diagonal screen.)
As happens so often on technology enthusiast sites I'm left with the question WHY?
WHY should 30% of USA phones in 2015 be devices that are beyond multimedia capable webphones?
(Hell, in this case I don't even understand what such phones are supposed to do.)
What would sell them? Why would the general public give a damn, much less fork over real money? If you give them an octa A15 processor with SGX565 parallelized to the gills, what do you expect them to do with it except bitch about the battery life?
I'm serious. These are the real questions. Not "what is possible".
PS. I can see only one trajectory I believe in (indeed, I even hope for it to happen) that would justify a bit more than a consolidation of current capabilities and some additional output, and this is where the phones replace the PC completely for 99% of the population. Even this would require little more in the way of hardware than output to high resolution screens. Mini displayport can already serve this purpose, but a better connector for phone -> peripherals might be Light Peak. One connector daisy chaining to devices, and input via bluetooth that is already available. But even in this scenario where the phone
is the pc, we still have to recognize that even in the PC market we can't sell high performance PCs to the general public and that the general public quite sensibly favors other values.
And unfortunately I believe we are a long way from replacing PCs completely with our phones, for software reasons, not hardware.