Which really further proves Intel's point - they don't want to design phone chips. They wanted to (and did) ape off old nodes for nearly a decade, sat on the same designs and never really competed for the mobile market. There wasn't a world where Intel pays for an ARM architecture license, designs Apple's cores, and then gets cheated out of a fair price in the dealmaking room. It's not worth it for them, had Intel signed onto such an agreement they'd only be guaranteed to cuck themselves in the future.

We can argue for or against Intel acquiring an ARM license in an alternate reality, but truth is they don't care. Apple wanted to turn them into something that would never work, and even if they got what they wanted, Apple's current supply-chain squeeze would have obviated any chance of Intel sticking around.

> There wasn't a world where Intel pays for an ARM architecture license, designs Apple's cores,

They had an ARM license and they had their own high-end cores that pretty much all PDAs used. In the early 2000s if you wanted a high-end ARM chip Intel was the default choice.

> We can argue for or against Intel acquiring an ARM license in an alternate reality, but truth is they don't care

Well as I said they already had one in our reality and could have easily ended up in the position Qualcomm is now if they played their cards right (well realistically in a better position because Qualcomm historically struggled keeping up with their own core designs and ended up switching to Cortex while Intel had a significant head start).