It does seem insane that a company would be able to just decide to start doing chip design and could do it better than Intel. But you can see how it happened. A

It does seem insane that a company would be able to just decide to start doing chip design and could do it better than Intel. But you can see how it happened. Apple obviously went for ARM in the first iPhone using a Samsung chip. It quickly became apparent that Samsung were going to be a competitor, and that the CPU is going to be a differentiator for the iPhone. So in 2008 Apple bought PA Semi, and started building that team up to produce a custom version of the iPhone chip - and that was a massive success, releasing their first chip in the iPhone 4 in 2010. So Apple have been designing their own CPUs for a decade now. Over that time, they've been massively focused on performance through efficiency - because they're concerned about battery life, power dissipation etc. Whereas Intel has been making bank by designing more and more powerful processors for the data centre. Of course Apple don't fabricate their own chips - they go to fabs like TSMC to actually manufacture the chips. Whereas Intel does that themselves. It's worth noting that TSMC is more of a direct competitor to Intel (they fab AMD chips too) and they've been executing their road map better than Intel have for a few years now.