Even if they had seen two process shrinks more, the relative efficiency benefit of that wouldn’t have topped 30%, which still wouldn’t make intel chips competit

Even if they had seen two process shrinks more, the relative efficiency benefit of that wouldn’t have topped 30%, which still wouldn’t make intel chips competitive with the m1. What intel needs is both a better fab process and a new core architecture. Apple might have waited one more year or maybe two at the most to get the same performance delta, but they would have switched regardless.