This is more about trying to soften the blow on Wall Street. I'm sure Intel had a good idea Apple's chip was going to blow the doors off their offerings.
But I don't really see how this will affect Intel financially in any meaningful way in the short term.
They won't provide chips for Apple anymore, but that must have been a relatively small number of units, so no great financial loss to them.
And Apple are never going to sell these chips generally, so there's no competition there.
In the long term though it may actually benefit Intel (and AMD/NVidia) who might work out exactly what Apple have done and possibly replicate it in their own CPUs.
That assumes Apple won't be growing its PC market share.
Given the M1's benefits, the ability of Big Sur to run iOS apps, and Apple's marketing prowess, I'd be surprised if they don't double their market share in the next 3 to 4 years.
Then there's the (highly lucrative) server market.
> Then there's the (highly lucrative) server market.
Apple has flirted with the server market on several occasions. I could see a well priced Apple server with an M series CPU doing quite well if Apple did it right. That said, Apple has never really shined here and it's not really their strong point.
I'm sure MacStadium would love if Apple launched a blade server platform where you could just slot Mac mini logic boards in.
I could see Apple potentially licensing the design (minus IP critical to their MacOS workstation offering like the GPU or neural engine), to a big cloud provider, if the cloud provider does the heavy lifting on the Linux port (something Apple isn’t publicly talking about) you could see this become a big deal overnight.
While Apple's volumes are low, often their parts are mostly the higher end chips. I think just about every i9 laptop mention I've ever seen has been in a MBP 16". So while it's 10-15% of Intel's volumes, I've heard numbers as high as 40% of the profit.
I have no idea how much of Intel's profit can be attributed to Apple, but Apple definitely buys more higher end laptop CPUs from Intel than anyone else. That's going to hurt their bottom line.
I also expect Apple will be picking up some market share. How much remains to be seen. If price/ performance was your primary reason for avoiding Apple, it's gotten a lot harder to resist switching.
I doubt much of the market cares particularly much about price/perf. But the $700 impact does seem like an impressive value that can do a wide range of things not normally considered for this price point. Things like editing 4k video.
