it seems to me that when apple does something it quickly becomes "accepted" by the consumers (even if it is a technical thing and not consumer facing). This is not always a bad thing for competitors
I think it's a combination of Apple owning enough of the stack to make it happen, and occasionally Apple's secrecy catching the rest of the industry flat footed. (see the 64bit ARM transition)
Funny you mentioned ARM! I have some inside stories to tell about that!
At the time it happened, many had already looked into the architecture and realized that to them there were no real benefits: 32-bit ARM could already address 1TB of memory, you could get the accelerated crypto instructions with an architecture extension and 64-bit ARM implementations were not very power efficient (a problem just recently solved by the latest A7x devices).
But when Apple switched to 64-bit ARM everyone else just had to follow along. This resulted in weaker Android phones for about a year. The funny thing is, the reason Apple switched so early is because they needed some head start since they use native apps. They didn't really needed the 64-bit ARM at that time yet.
I think one of the main advantages was to get onto the latest (or newer..) ARM instruction set, which I recall did increase performance Vs 32bit chips/instruction.
I'm definitely no expert though, any inside knowledge on this?
Yes, but you also lost a number of useful instructions (such as LDM). Also, many 3rd party implementations already incorporated at least a good subset of those accelerated instructions. So you could (and people did) create synthetic benchmarks where one architecture was 200% faster than the other.
Now, I am not saying that 64-bit was just fluff. The new design has a much nicer pipeline (specially thanks to the instructions they removed) which is MUCH better suited for things like speculative execution. But the implementation to make use of this wasn't really there until very recently. Here is a fun fact for you: the 64-bit Cortex-A53 and the 32-bit Cortex-A7 are 80% the same CPU. What does that tell you about the first generation of 64-bit devices?
Factor tech debt in: the sooner Apple introduced 64-bit ARM CPUs, the sooner they could be dropping support for 32-bit devices from the latest iOS (possibly even as soon as this year) then Xcode.
