Apple has made a great leap forward on the competition and they (the competition) will have to work hard to catch up, and this will be almost impossible to match or even overtake. The total horizontal and vertical integration offers Apple a big advantage. Just look at the A-Series SOC, it is still about 2 generations ahead of the best other SOC manufacturers can produce. This is not because Apple can do magic, it is because Apple owns their own HW and OS and can optimize it. They have much better margins (android smartphones have become a commodity, can only compete on price) so they can buy the latest production capacity from TSMC. But even if, and this is a big if, others produce a SOC as fast as Apples, they still need MS or Google to produce an Operating System. This will be generic, and thus less optimized, which means, slower. And even if Google or MS come up with a very fast and good OS version for ARM SOCs, they still have to convince Software Manufacturers to make SW for their platform, which is unproven and has a small install base (since they as yet have not anything that is like Rosetta2). Why would you as a SW developer do that, when you can make SW in the same time (or less) for a Mx series Apple or X86 windows with a much larger Install base? If Apple doesn't get serious problems or make mistakes, and properly scale the M series to 12-24-36 or more cores, and design each generation 10-20% faster than the last (like the A series), Apple will walk away from what others can offer in the next few years. The only ones who can really compete will be Google and MS when they start designing their own chips and optimizing them for their operating systems. This will also mean the end of generic computer designs (X86 Wintel, Android/ChromeOS). At least this is how I see it.