Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architect

Apple was never competing in the same space as Intel and AMD. From the beginning, Apple made ARM-based RISC chips. Intel and AMD used their own x86-64 architecture. Apple's was great for iPhones because of power efficiency. They were able to improve their chip designs so much that they smoked the competition away with the release of their first fusion chip (iPhone 7 I believe) and have been miles ahead of everyone else since. They then scaled up performance so much that a desktop ARM chip was made. That had never been done on a large scale before. So, no, imo Apple was never behind Intel and AMD, they were never competing in the same space.