[FlyingAvatar]

It's pretty difficult to imagine.

Apple did a ton of work on the power efficiency of iOS on their own ARM chips for iPhone for a decade before introducing the M1.

Since iOS and macOS share the same code base (even when they were on different architectures) it makes much more sense to simplify to a single chip architecture that they already had major expertise with and total control over.

There would be little to no upside for cutting Intel in on it.

[jopsen]

Isn't it also easier to license ARM, because that's the whole point of the ARM Corporation.

It's not like Intel or AMD are known for letting other customize their existing chip designs.

[rahkiin]

Apple was a very early investor in ARM and is one of the few with a perpetual license of ARM tech

[nly]

And an architect license that lets them modify the ISA I believe

[mandevil]

Intel and AMD both sell quite a lot of customized chips, at least in the server space. As one example, any EC2 R7i or R7a instance you have are not running on a Sapphire Rapids or EPYC processor that you could buy, but instead one customized for AWS. I would presume that other cloud providers have similar deals worked out.