ARM simply had a lot more room for improvement. Apple has the benefit on mobile that they can tailor the processor for the exact purpose of being in a cell phone. ARM has only achieved parity with intel lowest wattage chips. In fact, the A9X has more transistors (or at least a bigger die) than Intel's quad core skylake chips. Its not simple to scale up ARM from a ~5 W SOC design to > 80 W general purpose CPU and maintain performance with intel. Not to mention you have to start supporting connectivity like thunderbolt, PCIe, better memory controllers, etc.
Intel still pushes its power saving features. It has very good clock gating, i.e., shutting down parts of the processor that are not used. Core duo and Core 2 just seemed like a big jump because of how inefficient netburst (Pentium 4) was.
For Apple to adopt Zen it likely has to compete with intel across the product line. Apple values battery life and efficiency over all else, especially since their most popular macs are portables. Until AMD can match Intel in this space I think Apple will stick with Intel. I am skeptical Zen will match Skylake in this respect.
Basically its far to easy to dismiss Intel as "sleeping." I think this sentiment is mostly born out of Intel not focussing its efforts on the enthusiast CPU market, which is very small. Instead they have focused on efficiency for consumers and multithreaded performance for their server platforms. For Intel, this is a smart move but obviously frustrating if you are someone who wants some sort of mythical 6-8 core 5 Ghz chip that can play games or what not.
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