IMHO Intel's case is more nuanced, they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC. They are also a giant corporation who has to re-organise and restructure, therefore can't move as fast as a newcomer. Intel's case is a business case, more than an engineering case. Just as Nokia.
The point still stands: they have the infrastructure, the experience, the logistics and the supply chain all secured and they're still at least a couple years behind if not more. It's extremely optimistic to say that it's going to be easier to start from scratch.
Intel was receiving continuous beatings from AMD (Ryzen/Epyc) a few years before Apple came up with M1. 2016/2017 vs 2020. I don't think Apple and Intel are in much competition: Intel doesn't make laptops and lacked Apple's moat when they did, and Apple doesn't sell (amd64) server CPUs.
> they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC
I mean, that's true from a business perspective.
But they were trying very hard to make the next process node work. They went from a process upgrade every other design generation (the famous "tick-tock") to just tock-ing at 10nm because they couldn't get the next process generation working.
