I was pleasantly surprised Apple Silicon came out at all. Someone has their eye on long term vision at Apple at least, they just didn't do this on a whim.
Or someone told Tim "we can save $XYZ per phone if we switch to custom designed silicon, and potentially expand it to Mac as well so we no longer have Intel overheating our Macbooks."
He was after-all more of an operations guy than a product guy before moving into the CEO role.
The unified GPU and unified memory design was pretty important. They just didn’t go and replace intel, they replaced AMD/NVIDIA also. The GPUs in high end Apple silicon are even good enough for mid model inference, and unified memory makes it somewhat cost effective…that advantage probably wasn’t planned and comes from just a lot of good execution and smart R&D.
