Suppose Intel regains a process advantage over TSMC, so PCs have a major performance advantage over Apple Silicon.
Suppose TSMC remains dominant, so AMD stays ahead of Intel, and releases something successful in the phone market. Something open, unlike Qualcomm. Now you can get a high end phone that runs the latest stock Android for unlimited years. Qualcomm gets pushed down market so their current high end becomes available at lower prices. Each of these hack away at Apple's market share.
Microsoft has a competent hardware division. Suppose they get over themselves and release an Android handset. Quality hardware and no OEM crapware other than Microsoft services integration. A Windows tablet that can directly run Android apps. Apple then has another major competitor in their biggest markets and it's the company that nearly put them out of business the first time around.
The test is what happens when they face competent competition. Qualcomm sucks and Google only cares to the extent that they want to control the device to keep people on their services. That's been true since the end of the Jobs era but it isn't necessarily permanent.
That would be great to see, but doesn't seem to be happening.
Apple's big competitive advantages are here: 1) they control the OS and the app tools, so they can make switching more seamless and painless and 2) where it is painful, people are for some reason willing to take the pain from Apple where they wouldn't from others.
Intel is making bold claims, but they always do that. We don't find out until we find out.
> Apple's big competitive advantages are here: 1) they control the OS and the app tools, so they can make switching more seamless and painless
Everybody controls the OS and the app tools. Microsoft released ARM devices and nobody wanted them because the vast majority of new Window devices were still amd64 and developers had no reason to target the six people who had Windows RT.
Apple typically succeeds with hardware architecture changes because they only do it when the new architecture has a big advantage, at which point everybody buys it and understands it to be the future and developers port their apps.
They could switch back to Intel pretty easily, because people are still releasing Intel apps and Apple still sells Intel Macs, but then they've stranded everyone who bought Apple Silicon or spent effort to support it and harmed their reputation. They might not want to do that just because Intel is 10% faster. But then Intel is 10% faster and the highest margin customers who just want The Best are going to the other team.
It's choices like that which can break companies because neither option is good but it's not obvious at the outset which bad option is worse.
> and 2) where it is painful, people are for some reason willing to take the pain from Apple where they wouldn't from others.
This is the thing where their competitors are jackasses. When Apple does something customer-hostile like making batteries or memory non-removable or not publishing driver documentation, their competitors copy it immediately, because hey, Apple is making so much money, shouldn't we do what they do? When they support their devices for a long time or don't put ads in their OS, their competitors take the "screw the customer" option again.
So Apple has a strong reputation because the likes of Qualcomm and Microsoft are awful. But what happens if anyone ever shows up who offers the market the things people like about Apple and not the things people don't?
People will put up with more bullshit because it's also a fashion statement.
And on top of that they have very good interop between the different parts of their ecosystem, and make going outside of that ecosystem painful, so you need a very good reason to jump ship once you've gotten into it.
They have a pretty good moat, and that buys time for any missteps to be corrected.
This isn't relevant to what I'm commenting on, which is that Intel might leapfrog Apple with a big new change. Intel do not control the OS and the app tools.
In the post Jony Ive era the Mac hardware division has pretty much addressed every hardware complaint that people had about the Ive-era hardware and reversed the trend away from delivering what people wanted.
My MBP 14" is (a lot) thicker than the old models, has an SD Card, MagSafe charger, HDMI and headphone ports, a great (great) keyboard with no touchbar (although I liked the touchbar), and plenty of USB ports.
This seems unlikely because of the very strong IP position Qualcomm has.
Apple and Intel combined couldn't break that position just on the modem front so good luck to AMD if they tried to build a competitive SoC without licensing Qualcomm IP and with no substantial ARM experience.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90382055/apple-was-always-going-...
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/28/apple-5g-modem-failed-q...
Apple is not decreasing today at all, but it has not made any vision-revolution recently either. The most innovative things they launched are not visionary, the are mostly logical technological upgrades (M1, cameras, ...), or are being reverted/scrapped/fixed (the touch bar, the notch, ...). It also has a huge pressure to not be monopolistic anymore with the App Store.