That's a lot of if's and but's that ignores a very important fact - most of Apple's top engineers from their CPU division have already quit Apple ...

Source: Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In - https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and...

If they can't innovate, all they can do is keep increasing the core count ... don't think that'll help them compete with future AMD / Intel / ARM or RISC cpus in the long term.