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.

Apple acquired PA Semi in 2008 then Intrinsity in 2010. They have been using their own ARM cores since 2012 with the A6 SoC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6

They've been designing the A-series chips in iPhone and iPad since the A4 in 2010.

20 years ago, Palo Alto Semiconductor was founded, and 15 years ago, Apple bought them in order to start building their own CPUs.

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.

It wasn’t that quickly if you consider the years of iPhone chips leading up to it.

They've been doing this for years. It was just mobile only at first.

So quickly 10 years in the making.

Not quickly. People have been predicting this since the PA Semi purchase.

They first spent 10 years making their own mobile chips.

Probably billions of dollars in R&D and extremely clear executive guidance?

What is "quickly" for you?

They don't "make" them, they design it.

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.