The reason why Apple moved from Intel to Apple Silicon is the same reason why Apple left Power PC for Intel back in 2005. Let me count the ways.
Performance factor
The Apple A12X is now quite as powerful as most notebooks in the market. It’s amazing that you can edit a few streams of 4K video on fanless thin tablet. So performance per watt on the A12 is much more than on Intel chips. Imagine all this on 15w TDP and scale up on 45w like the one used in a MacBook Pro.
ARM in the early days was not optimized for performance, but instead for power usage. Apple come into the scene and design the ARM platform to be not only power-efficient, but highly performant.
CPU Vendor factor
Back in the PowerPC day, you can tell the PowerPC held Apple back. Their chips consume too much power, it’s not as good as it use to be and Apple partners at the time IBM and Motorola does not seems to pour resources into making a better solution. So the PowerPC platform stagnated while Intel platform steadily chug along and pushing the performance envelop.
Today, Intel for whatever reason started to hit the wall when trying to downscale their processor at 14nm. Now they just started to release at 10nm while Apple already doing 7nm and start thinking about 5nm. And just like back in early 2000s as IBM clearly struggled to update the PowerPC, today Intel struggled to update their core processors while their competitors AMD and even Apple steadily chug along.
For the last couple of years, Apple Macs is beholden to intel tick-tock cycle and later delivery issues. Because of that, Macs wasn’t updated as frequently as possible and in some cases, the product lay stagnant for years, which is centuries in the PC world. Being a star client for Intel, Apple will have more advanced knowledge of Intel roadmap than the public. Just like back then, Apple looked at the road ahead and decided what’s best for their platform. Back then it was Intel, today it was Apple silicon. Having your own chips ensure that your are control of your own destiny.
Apple’s Vision
Because they had a better platform than a PowerPC, they can make better products for their customers. MacBook Air is possible because of intel core chips. Apple laptops are thinner and sleeker when transition to intel chips. The newer iMac is smaller, thinner and lighter when moving to intel. Apple can make better hardware because of a newer, better platform. The MacBook Air fanless design is something that happen wants to do in the future. Compact but highly capable powerful computers that is silent. The rumoured redesigned iMac is a testament of Apple future.
Finally, this was actually Apple goals sometime in early 2010s. Starting from 2015, Apple A-series chips saw the performance intel chips gets closer and closer until at A12, it was as good or beat intel chips. One was wondering why Apple makes overpowering chips for small iPhones when users clearly didn’t need all that processing power.
All is coming together
Starting early 2010s, Apple make a series of moves that bucks the trends of maintaining backwards compatibility. Like removing 32-bit support. Ensuring that you need processors that can handle metal, Apple graphical APIs. It also started to merge iPadOS with macOS. Like using catalyst which allows the same interface to be used on iPad and Mac. All this is just groundwork so that Apple can transition to 64-bit Apple silicon in the future.
Not only they make it easier to make apps for both macOS and ipadOS, they ensure that iOs apps can run on the ARM macs from day one. this means millions of beloved apps on iOS, available on ARM macs on day one. since the iOS platform has a billion users, a few 10s of millions of users will benefit from the immense software catalog. Apple masterstroke in the ARM transition is to have millions of iOS and iPadOS apps available on ARM macs from day one. when Microsoft released windows on ARM, they have to twist developers arm to create software on the ARM. Apple ensure that all your apps on your phone that you love to use, is in your mac. And sure enough, when the M1 hardware finally released, most of the major software companies released M1-compatible software within a week. Contrast that with Google still don’t have a Chrome app running on Windows ARM despite the Windows ARM has been in the market for 2 years.
The reason Apple appears invincible today is not because Apple sells the best product, but they are both the most to hold on to their ideals and the first to embrace change when necessary. The A-series transition was a decade in the making but they quickly evolving of what they are, from a computer company, to a music player company, to a smartphone company, to a lifestyle company and now a services company. Who knows what kind of company Apple will be in the future.
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