Bring in people with expertise, buy outside expertise where you can, focus on the product you actually want instead of the product that will appeal to every possible use case for every possible customer that the chip marketing team can imagine, don't sweat where you can put the margin line between chip and system integrator, because they are both you.
I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.
The iPhone chip was seriously competitive with laptops 2-3 years before the M1, it's just that due to the software environment few people noticed what was going on.
The real question is why Apple left it so long. They clearly wanted the first generation to be a clear success, but they could have probably pulled this off faster had they wanted to.
I don't think we're comparing apples to apples here (excuse the pun). These chips have something like 10% of the instructions that a typical x86 chip does. Once the big CPU players start producing the same kind of chips, I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc.
> I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc
Nope. Apple and AMD both use TSMC for manufacturing. It's all made by the same factory. AMD does not have the advantage there. Apple buys the most capacity on the most advanced process nodes since they place much bigger orders (Apple also has 10x more cash than AMD).
I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.