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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.

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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.

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

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

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.

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