For a more in-depth analysis of the new chips:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-m1-max-giant-new-socs-with-allout-performance
My feeling—and the AnandTech analysis seems to validate it—is that Apple is trying to transform itself from a company whose ability to innovate is characterized primarily by industrial design and closely coupling hardware with software into one that emphasizes hardware engineering.
In many respects, at least in the laptop/desktop/tower space, Apple hardware really hasn't been that different from the hardware assembled by a PC "manufacturer." For the most part, Apple has simply been integrating stock parts, some of which have minor Apple-specified supplier customizations, wrapping them in attractive shells, and selling them at price-points that often are higher than those charged by the PC assembly companies for boxen that perform comparably.
But Apple's current migration to very-large-scale CPU/GPU microprocessors, designed by Apple and manufactured in Taiwan, finally may elevate consumer computers to a level of hardware innovation that until now has only been available to institutional customers of big iron for multiuser computing and switches for Internet management.
I don't know how the market will respond to this, but it's a serious and interesting bet. And I think it is worth noting that without
TSMC to produce the new high-density Apple chips, the strategy would have been much more difficult and possibly impossible at this time to implement. From what I've been reading, many manufacturers seem lately to be rethinking the benefits of economic globalization; the Apple strategy may offer an argument for forging ahead.