1. they write a performant translator to run old apps on the new chips
2. they move to a faster processor
On the non-apple front, Qualcomm isn’t making faster chips than Intel or AMD; even the best translators are going to be very slow running legacy apps
When Apple transitioned to Intel the PowerPC platform was way behind on a performance basis. In this case it wasn’t deliberate. But when it transitioned from Intel to ARM, Apple was again way behind on performance compared to contemporary competitors, making the transition look better than if it was up to date.
If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. But they weren’t so it looked like an increase in performance along with an increase in battery life, which made the transition a no brainer for Apple.
And they were able to do this because they tightly couple their OS with the hardware, so they can control the transition without having, say Acer stick macOS on a laptop that makes the M1 not look as great as the previous Apple Intel Mac.
Apple transitioned after it became obvious that consumers were starting to prefer laptops over desktops, and Power PC (as well as Pentium IV) chips had problems with both power draw and heat.
As soon as Intel transitioned to Core, Apple transitioned to Intel.
Apple transitioned to ARM after Intel ran into the same issues with power draw and heat again,
Since printing and graphics were one of Apple's largest markets, they were better positioned in that market with good floating point performance.
It's also the reason that Apple showed off Mac vs. PC Photoshop performance so frequently in that time period.
The M1 launched two months after the first Intel Tiger Lake processors, so Apple was pretty much on-time for moving the 13" MacBook Pro off of Intel's Ice Lake, and it wasn't behind on performance: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-v...
The larger MacBook Pro was later moving off Intel and was using a very old (2.5 years) Intel CPU at the time the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched, but even comparing against the CPUs Intel had at the time for machines of that class, the M1 Pro's performance looks fine: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-v... And it's important to note that Intel themselves were largely to blame for the fact that the larger MacBook Pro was still using a 2.5 year old CPU: Intel never shipped Ice Lake processors for desktop or high-power mobile, so the Coffee Lake Refresh processors didn't have a successor from Intel until five months before the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched.
But for real applications the 7940Hs, beats the Qualcomm even on Cinnebench Single core and multicore
They're going to need Rosetta-like translation performance to beat Intel. Which also begs the question: do modern Qualcoms even come with native 32 bit support? Unlike amd64, aarch64 has no 32 bit compatibility guarantees.
On Linux the situation will be very different. That's why I hope they release these devices for relatively cheap (because most applications and games will be quite slow) so Linux users can get good perf out of them for almost all native tools while Windows userspace catches up.
Microsoft's compatibility layers are pretty competitive. You get about 60% of the performance whereas Rosetta 2 is closer to 70%, which is impressive when you consider MS has no hardware bits to do that unlike Apple.
What has been more of an issue is the slow CPUs themselves. The upcoming Orion chips should perform similarly to M1 on x86 programs.
I'd add a point three to the above: Apple's own in-house software was ready to go when they launched the new chip.
3. They also ported the only apps who ran on Macs.
When Adobe, Autodesk, PTC, Cadence and so on, will have their programs ported to ARM, then yes, Windows will run on ARM.