>They somehow convinced people low power consumption on CPU mattered.

As an ARM processor enthusiast since the 90's, it's all I care about.

I'm not convinced it will ever stop being important.

Battery life in mobile products doesn't matter now?

Yeah I'm sure you use 6 hours of battery life before you find a charger and aren't a loyalist to a corporation.

I think for a while it was because they had a superior user experience that would compound with the more Apple products you acquired.

That, combined with sleek marketing and a good eye for product design, and building what was the best smartphone by far (IMO) in the world at the time it was first released, snowballed into Apple becoming the behomoth it is today.

I remember in 2018 they didn't have widgets, had like 3 different apps that had bugs, the swiping was slow after disabling animations, and everyday I was told I had to update.

Great quality.

And in 2018 the Pixel 2 was the Android flagship with 3 years of updates promised, with a Snapdragon 835 that was half the single thread speed of the corresponding A11 and slower in multicore with two extra cores.

Remember (not that long ago) when Apple was years ahead of ARM on performance, had vastly better support windows for their hardware and vastly better UI and UX? It is just that today Android has mostly caught up if not surpassed on a phone basis, but e.g. we still see a better ecosystem of iPhone + Watch with Apple, as well as between users.