At the beginning of last month, the latest round of flagship Android processors where unveiled in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chips, which along with new phones like the ASUS ROG Phone 9, proved to literally be a genuine step forward compared to the previous Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 devices that make up most of this year’s flagship smartphone offerings. Even more impressive, is that despite having 30% better battery performance, these processors are definitively faster and ahead of Apple’s A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro phones, something that’s never quite definitively be done. Qualcomm has finally won the smartphone CPU race. And yet, no one really cares, because in a world where all fast smartphones seem the same, one thing has become clear: Apple was probably right to put console games on the iPhone.

Now if you somehow don’t know this (and the video above hasn’t summarized this whole article for you), Apple’s move to bring some AAA console games to the iPhone last year was maybe not as hollow as we initially thought. At least not in the way we originally envisioned it. The company’s move to court developers and bring the likes of Resident Evil 4 remake and Assassin’s Creed to the iPhone 15 Pro last year and now the full 16 range caught people’s attention, and that’s what it was meant to do, not because Apple wants to turn your iPhone into a gaming console, but because the sheer number of iPhone users is too big of an offer for any game developer to say no to, and makes them all inadvertently make Mac Games as well, which is what Apple really wants as it continues to steal key advantages away from Windows.

This is something we called out last year and it’s still true this year. But after watching the Snapdragon launch event and the really cool gaming phone that launched with it in the ROG Phone 9, I have to admit I felt a little underwhelmed by what’s coming to the next generation of Android phones. And that makes me see the genius in Apple’s approach.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still fully convinced that Apple doesn’t want the iPhone to be a game console. Even they know how sucky of a predicament that is. After all you have to take up 40-60GB of your phone’s 128GB of space, rebuy a game you may already own, buy or use some kind of extra controller, and do all that while keeping note of the phone overheating and it’s battery draining pretty rapidly.

Simply put, the iPhone isn’t built for console gaming. But it can still DO IT. Meanwhile a whole generation of faster, longer-lasting Android phones (including a gaming phone that outright fixes most of the iPhone’s gaming woes) won’t run these games. Or have any other attention-grabbing feature that shows off their power. And that honestly makes them seem like any yearly processor upgrade that came before. And suddenly, Apple’s iPhone Gaming makes sense even beyond being a way to finally make the Mac some games. It gives iPhone users bragging rights. Something they’ve honestly been lacking in a world where ecosystem features, great cameras, and optimized software are all available on Android as well. And well these new processors don’t bring Android phones any bragging rights. Which makes me give Apple a win I didn’t even know they had.

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