It wouldn’t have mattered if Intel controlled the OS or not - it just wasn’t competitive. There’s nothing you can learn from it about Apple - who delivered an ultra competitive, likely even when emulating Intel architecture in software.
Arm has swapped a large part of its application user base from 32 bit to a completely incompatible but more modern 64 bit ISA and Apple has cast off the 32bit legacy completely due to its ability to control the whole stack.
Intel could easily open up their boot and make the store there much better.
The don't quite have the vertical control of Apple, but to say they are fundamentally hindered by their legacy is quite questionable.
The fucked up improving their manufacturing.
Once devs will sort out their new shiny ARM Macs whoes (Docker, other tooling) I smell there may be ARM server market rising soon.
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/armhf/ch02s01...
AMD's Epyc chips are pretty awesome though too so I don't think x64 is on it's death bed.. but it should be an interesting couple of years watching this space heat up.
It is about lack of control over legacy killing the progress. The power of Intel is "proven" legacy, but building completely new architecture is expensive and prone to adoption failure (Itanium?) when Intel has no control over OS (Windows), apps or virtualization software.
Then Apple has control over all that: they can make hardware (scaled up mobile HW), change their OS to support it (iOS bits), support past apps (Rosetta), enforce support in new apps (compiler, LLVM, certification).