> I wonder how long it REALLY took them to move from intel to apple silicon, which they don't even make.

Apple has much, much more control over their silicon than they ever had with Intel.

With Intel, they were stuck with whatever Intel could supply - and that, particularly regarding power management, wasn't much.

In contrast, for ARM, Apple has been one of their longest-ever partners [1], with Apple holding one of the very rare and probably very expensive "Architecture Licenses" that allow Apple to not just build CPUs out of pre-made IP blocks, but also design their own cores and, and that is the crucial thing, extend the ARM instruction set on their CPUs.

The latter is what made the ARM move feasible, there would have been no way of getting high-performance emulation of x86 without a few specific extensions.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-inks-new-deal-arm...