Apple "clearly had something brewing on the CPU front" sure, they were just getting into the mobile phone industry; hearing that Apple would eventually make their own smartphone chips wouldn't have been surprising.

What might've been surprising is them getting into the big, high performance desktop-class CPU segment and leading the industry in efficiency and performance HEDT chips for desktops.

And Intel's relative irrelevance is certainly surprising, as is them losing the fab game to TSMC.