Oh Im pretty sure since the ipad pro launched or maybe the gen after, their scores in various benchmarks were getting scary close to the intel benchmarks. It mightve started maybe 30% off but with each generation the gap closed. It was increasingly clear that apples arm chips weren’t just toy chips limited to tablets and tech media talked about how it was only a matter of time before there would be an arm mac or a mac/ios convergence.

Whenever Tim Cook was asked, why pretty much up until maybe a few months before the apple silicon announcement, he said there weren’t any plans to switch the mac to arm.