> I don't have any inside-Apple perspective, but my guess is having a tight feedback cycle between the profiles of their own software and the abilities of their own hardware has helped them greatly.
Also we see not the first chip but the first one that met their needs (demonstrably better performance on their workloads).
By which I mean: presumably MacOS has been running a many generations of A processors, so they have had a lot of time to figure out what tweaks would be good and which turn out to be pessimization and overkill. It doesn't hurt that there is significant internal overlap between modern macOS and iOS.
Also we see not the first chip but the first one that met their needs (demonstrably better performance on their workloads).
By which I mean: presumably MacOS has been running a many generations of A processors, so they have had a lot of time to figure out what tweaks would be good and which turn out to be pessimization and overkill. It doesn't hurt that there is significant internal overlap between modern macOS and iOS.