>And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.

sales of what

i actually can't think of a single competing product. admittedly i don't keep up with laptop news but still, i haven't heard of anything yet that can meaningfully compete with the m1 from four years ago

Microsoft just announced some lackluster arm laptops that they claim can compete with M-series chips. The question is what windows programs are gonna run on them...

Some people have been running Windows 11 for Arm on a VM in Apple Silicon. It has an automatic transcoder that translates most x86 code at start. It seems to run many apps well. Microsoft claims these new machines have a better transcoder. This might work.

Some folks have looked into it, and it doesn't sound too bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-tMBk9Vx4

For me at least, the best possible outcome of this is that Windows handheld gaming devices become more power-efficient. That might be an advantage over Linux-based handhelds for a while, unless Valve decide that Proton needs to also be an architecture emulator. The chip efficiency wins must surely be tempting in this form factor.

Your question answers itself. "What Windows programs" is the key part.

I don't have any need for any Windows-only program.

> And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.

Not sure where “procrastinating” fits in (a typo?), but as Scott McNealy once said, “If someone shows up and eats our lunch, it might so well be us.”

There may be a world in which Apple is procrastinating in chip design, but it's not this one.