[kux]

Apple has significant motivation to ditch x86 now that Intel has an effective monopoly in high end x86 chips. Intel's fab process is 2+ years ahead of the fabs used AMD and ARM competitors though, so Apple switching architectures will only make sense in the long run.

ARM competes because of a more power efficient architecture; however, this difference is less of an issue if Intel's fab process can get farther ahead of the competition.

In short term(next 4 years) Intel's lead fab lead will likely continue to grow, because Intel switched to Tri-Gate(FinFET) at the 22nm node while TSMC and others will not adopt similar technologies until 16nm node(2014 or later).