Yes moving to a new architecture is challenging, but Apple has done it before any this time it can be for keeps. Never again will they be beholden to another company’s priorities, or stuck with me-too processors their competitors have equal access to. A better Intel road map might have resulted in putting the transition off, but I think it was inevitable eventually ever since Apple bought PA Semi.
The problem with Intel missing on 10 nm is not so much that 10 nm is critical, but that it is critical to their roadmap. Large CPU design is heavily pipelined (like large CPUs), so you miss on the process node, you've still got a team building the refined next release for the year after, and a third team working on the more refined release for the following year.
Then you have decision making; it's hard to get a sense for if you need to go back and make a good new design on 14 nm, if 10 nm is going to be ready enough soon (but it's been several years now of not ready enough), splitting design resources.
I wonder if the migration from "tick-tock" to every third iteration is a case of believing your own PR. "Everything is fine" is what they should have been telling us, while internally it was flashing red lights and klaxons.
Or maybe this started even earlier, with the generations of hardware that gave us Spectre. The target became unreachable, they used smoke and mirrors, and when that blew up they just sort of gave up. Maybe the intervention should have come back then but didn't (cite the "MBAs took over" comment elsewhere in the thread)
It's not just Intel's failure. They must think their chips are competitive against AMD's as well (or they're all in on iOS apps on Macs).
Personally, I'm very skeptical on Apple beating AMD.
Plus probably still cheaper than any x86 alternative.
Apple marketing always reminded me of how for decades, Rolls-Royce advertisements never would explicitly say things like the engine horsepower and displacement-- just "ample."
Now it will be that much easier to dodge performance questions. "Our machines are not built to run (mainstream software or game), so of course the performance is sketchy in the emulation penalty box. Just run the seven pieces of native MacOS software and it really flies."
I don't personally believe that Apple would be going to in-house silicon instead of Intel for its flagship laptops if there were a viable way to avoid doing so. Intel is so hurt right now that I surmise it'd be willing to negotiate a fat discount for a flag-carrying customer, and the loss of Windows functionality is kind of disappointing at the upper end of the market (where some tools are clearly better supported by windows or at least x86).