Vertical integration seems to have really paid off for Apple as it's really what allowed them to pull this off. While I certainly expect cloud providers to continue adopting ARM CPUs, I'm worried that the enthusiast/DIY desktop market will be irrelevant if x86 continues to lag behind ARM. It certainty doesn't seem like buying an Ampere server is as simple as getting an x86 machine. Perhaps POWER10 or eventually RISC-V offerings will become more accessible & competitive?
Regarding vertical integration, I wonder if their owning the OS and the hardware stacks lead to special insights on what would lead to better performance.
And they are completely unconstrained in where to put the compute. They can decide to add new special hardware to the SOC and just support it in the OS.
