While I would have thought that going with AMD over Intel would have bought Apple a few more years in the x86 Instruction Set, Apple felt that this change was coming eventually, so embrace it and accept the future that is entirely in their hands.
Obviously, Apple has been working towards this for the past few years. Intel failed to advance the Lake series of processors and any cache gains came at the expense of vulnerabilities that minimized those gains when patched. Remaining at 14nm while the world’s major chip fabrication companies have advanced to 7nm and even 5nm was the last straw. I’m sure Apple was feeling Déjà vu all over again like when the PowerPC was failing to produce the speed Apple wanted without using too much power and generating too much heat, prompting the transition to Intel x86.
I wouldn’t put too much on other vendors’ ARM CPUs versus Apple’s A-series of ARM processors. When you control the OS and the hardware it runs on like Apple is, you can make optimizations that would be impractical for a general purpose CPU to implement without complaints of playing favorites from competing OS platforms.
Finally, we may see the sunsetting of the Hackintosh. Unless a market in taking recycled iPads and iPhones apart for their A-chips, a 3rd party probably won’t have much success with creating a Macintosh clone using off-the-shelf parts.
