It would, but it would also drain a lot of investor confidence. Intel pulling the TSMC card in 2024 is acceptable, or even desirable, from a shareholder perspective. Doing it in 2017 would have been jaw-dropping, even if it came with the advantages of TSMC 7nm that AMD's mobile chipsets boasted. It might have been the right call, but it would be a kick in the pants to their fab business and a terrible omen of things to come.
> But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate
100% agree, and I feel like it's more to my point. Intel was a holdover from an era where Apple had to ditch their reliance on PowerPC. Buying pre-designed chips was an opportunistic success story on a high-margin product like the Mac, and it worked both ways until Apple started designing their own cores. Once Apple could ship an SOC that outperformed Intel, it didn't matter how much it cost to make because there was no middleman to pay. By any means necessary, undercutting Intel was a business imperative for Apple.
I guess the ultimate irony of this is how I hear people begging OEMs to license ARM tech for PCs now. Intel failed as a rent-seeking middleman for high-performance core designs, so now they will be supplanted by Arm, a rent-seeking middleman for low-performance core designs. All Arm Holdings has to do now is buy a fab and they'll be a dead ringer.
Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures, and the resulting design pipeline bubble that meant a lot of stagnation after Kaby Lake instead of the tick/tock(/tock) cycle of sort of annual improvements.
But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate, and Apple has a niche where their cpu requirements are different enough, that a custom solution is better. AFAIK, Intel hasn't been willing to make really custom CPUs. The Apple cpus target a lower clockspeed, and that enables a smaller chip, and makes wider execution more feasible, and generates less heat. Intel probably wasn't willing to make a high performance but clock limited design. And Apple might not have wanted to have people compare their laptops with an Intel CPU that only runs at say 3GHz when everyone else is using chips that turbo to 4.5Ghz.