They already released the Comet Lake based iMac. At this point, given the intense consumer interest in Apple Silicon, people may skip a new x86 based Mac. People are sick of hearing the fans spin up and the computer over heating or throttling under sustained load. This (overheating) doesn’t happen on current Apple Silicon and probably won’t on new iterations.
It’s a business risk to allocate capital to produce and release an intel based Mac now in this environment, unless it’s a screamer in terms of performance. Apple has said it will complete the transition by 2022, so people may wait for the Apple Silicon version.
I would love to see a new intel version, but I don’t have much confidence in Intel’s IPC performance until at least Alder Lake. But maybe rocket lake might surprise us.
Rather than pursuing x86, couldn’t Apple get AMD to write ARM drivers for its GPUs instead?