Especially when your lifeline is tied to Apple. No way are they going to manage to raise prices in a meaningful way.

Apple was one of the founding investors of ARM back in 1990 - it's likely they have an extremely generous licence and pricing terms as a result.

Apple’s involvement with ARM’s founding has zero impact on their negotiations or pricing.

It does when that involvement means they're one of the few architecture licensees. Allegedly.

They have an architectural license (for Arm v8/9) because they are a huge customer with deep pockets not because of a shareholding they sold a decade before that architecture was announced!

It's not the deep pockets per se, but the hand Apple had in designing AArch64. Apparently their relationship with ARM is more like the Intel/AMD relationship, ie. cross-licensing.

SoftBank has/invests so many business related to Apple (like mobile career), that may affected to negotiation.

> No way are they going to negotiate to raise prices in a meaningful way against their largest client.

Why not? It's not like Apple will have anywhere else to go for the next 8 years. x86 cores are too slow and power-hungry for the foreseeable future, and building their own risc-V core will take... at least 8 years.

8 years sounds like an absurdly long time to retrofit a different instruction set onto an existing CPU core design.

The deal with apple is probably 0.1% of revenue from all hardware sales that contain ARM IP or something similar.

Which means that if Apple decide to switch to RISC-V to save money, the deal is still in effect, but no money will be paid, so there might as well be no deal.

You think it's that low?

Yes. For ARM, having apple as a customer is a massive investor and customer confidence boost.

For Apple, they won't offer much because they could develop their own CPU architecture ISA pretty easily (they control all code and compilers for the platform after all, and already employ lots of compiler and CPU developers).