[mortenjorck]

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.

[clairity]

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.