I like AMD, and I like competition, but they didn't "pistol whip" Intel. Ryzen provides better multi-thead benchmarks. Intel provides better single-thread. Most programs today are still biased towards single-thread processes with certain notable exceptions in editing and scientific computing. Gaming is also still single-core biased (although this is quickly changing) based on benchmarks provided by big tech reviewers. The good thing about all this is that we have 2 players back in the race. AMD is price competitive and is going to force Intel to innovate and become more price competitive. The consumers were really the big losers over the past number of years while Intel sat on their laurels with no real competition.
You hit the nail right on it's head. People in this thread proclaiming AMD Ryzen is much better compared to Intel don't seem to have any clue on what they are talking about.
AMD Ryzen provides a great price/threads/cores scenario. For some use cases that is great and all. But for Apple? Not so much. Currently they have no mobile parts. So there is nothing available that is sensible for any MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. So the wast majority of Apple's line-up doesn't have anything AMD Ryzen they could implement.
Not to mention how Apple is greatly optimised towards Intel and their architectural design. macOS uses specific Intel optimisation in order to get things like PowerNap and various other features to work. I'm not saying it's impossible to do the same with AMD, but it would require a lot of re-work of the kernel and the drivers. All that work will cost time and money and all that while AMD Ryzen still offers inferior single-thread performance and IPC which is still the most relevant thing for consistent performance for most users.
AMD Ryzen is more like Qualcomm-Snapdragon in the ARM world. They can't compete on the core level, so instead they optimise towards tossing additional cores into the mix in order to achieve better performance. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but as of today there are so much software that is not easily run in parallel. This is not about "lazy developers", this is about coding and how some tasks just doesn't do well when run in parallel making super-fast and super-efficient single-threads relevant for the foreseeable future.
Especially games that relies on so much real-time input and output is downright impossible to run efficiently in parallel. Sure, you have portion of the code that could benefit from parallelization. But all the real-time rendering, input and outputs etc can't be easily spread along multiple threads without causing a huge spike in added latency which is horrible for gaming. Other tasks like encoding etc where latency isn't relevant at all you can easily strip the workload over as many cores/threads as you want without any major drawbacks.
And that's only talking about Ryzen and the whole more cores vs less efficient cores etc.. But Ryzen has also proven to feature slower NVMe throughput, it lacks Thunderbolt etc.. And it comes with half the AVX performance so all macOS applications using modern AVX instructions will essentially get their performance halved.
And in terms of the "Pro" market there is no company that has Ryzen on their QVL lists yet. VMWare for instance do not recommend Ryzen as the virtualisation performance is doing much worse on Ryzen compared to Intel. And until things like these gets solved and stuff starts to get certified and optimised by the major companies in the professional market Apple should not really consider Ryzen unless they want to annihilate this entire market.
So again, to everyone proclaiming "AMD Ryzen is so much better". Do you really know what you are talking about?