[hinkley]

It's a curious thing in business. People will do all sorts of things to keep from losing a big customer to a competitor. Some big companies keep multiple vendors and play them off each other. If I don't like you this week I place an order with the other guys.

Intel's weak spot has always (or at least often) been mips per watt. Apple has a whole slew of products in the ultraportable niche and given their focus could easily have more.

If a custom ARM-like chip gives them the option to stop using Intel chips on everything but the MacBook Pro line, that would be worth a lot to them, even if they continued to use Intel chips on those devices. Just the threat gets them concessions.

[seunosewa]

Intel CPUs have the highest performance per watt when running performance intensive code. The problem was that they could not scale down energy usage enough when performance requirements were very low, such as on mobile devices, and thats what they have been trying to fix for some years.