My private conspiracy theory (supported by nothing) is that Intel promised to Apple good 10w processors back in 2014-ish, and Apple designed 2016 MBP based on that promise. And when Intel didn't delivered, they shipped Macs anyway, and either started working on M1 or cleared any doubt about should they continue working on it.
that’s not just your (conspiracy) theory, it’s exactly what happened (something i’ve also noted before). intel screwed apple years ago and apple decided to move on. it just took many years of chip development to get to this point.
Honestly wouldn't be surprised if it came out that they started working (at least theoretically) on Apple Silicon when they transitioned to Intel in the first place and it just took this many years for all the pieces to be ready and lined up.
Not only plausible, I'd say this is the most likely way it played out.
At the time of the Intel transition, Apple had already gone through the process once before with 68k to PPC. It had to be clear to the long-game thinkers at Apple that this cycle would keep repeating itself until Apple found a way to bring that critical part of its platform under its own control. Intel was riding high in 2006, but so had IBM in 1994.
Within two years of the Intel transition, Apple acquired P.A. Semi. The iPhone had barely been out for a year at that point, and still represented a fraction of the company's Mac revenue – and while it looked to us outsiders like the acquisition was all about the iPhone and iPad, in retrospect, a long-term replacement for Intel was almost certainly the endgame all along.
possible, but as outsiders, it's hard to be sure of that sequence of events with those sets of facts, to draw that conclusion definitively. perhaps that was a backup plan that quickly became the primary plan.
but with the 2016 line of macs, it was obvious that apple was expecting faster, smaller, cooler, more power efficient 10nm chips from intel, and intel fell flat on their face delivering. it's not clear how far before that that apple knew intel was flubbing, but 2014 seems a reasonable assumption given product development timelines. as intel's downward trajectory became clearer over the following months, along with the robustly upward trajectory of apple silicon, the transition became realizable, and eventually inevitable.
as an aside, i'm using a beat up 2015 macbook pro and eagerly awaiting the m2 version as its replacement, seeking to skip this whole intel misstep entirely.
I think Apple would have been perfectly happy buying CPUs from Intel as long as Intel kept their end of the bargain up.
After the PowerPC fiasco and IBM leaving Apple high and dry, I have zero doubt that there was a contingency plan always under way before the ink even dried on the PA Semi acquisition, but it wasn't probably a concrete strategy until about the third time in a row Intel left Apple high and dry on a bed of empty promises.
Apple has so much experience with processor transitions they don't have to stay on ARM either. And they have the capital to move somewhere else if it makes enough sense to them. I find it highly unlikely - but if it made sense it would be highly probable :)
