I agree that it is unlikely that Apple will sell the M1 chip separately exactly for the reasons I mentioned in my post. However, they do not have to sell the c

I agree that it is unlikely that Apple will sell the M1 chip separately exactly for the reasons I mentioned in my post. However, they do not have to sell the chip individually to be a competitor to AMD. If Apple’s are sufficiently attractive it will eat the market share of consumer devices from the likes of Dell/HP/etc. When they start selling less devices they have less need for AMD or Intel CPUs. This leaves only the datacenter market where Apple will not compete with Intel and AMD. Indeed, there is lots of room for a (new?) player to pull of the same trick as Apple for general purpose cpus. I just think they are not as well positioned because of the lack of vertical integration. So AMD and Intel indirectly have to worry about what Apple is doing.