Apple has (to a first approximation) a royalty-free license to ARM IP by virtue of the fact that they co-founded ARM - so yes, Qualcomm is most likely paying ARM more than Apple is.

Just to clarify for those that don't know ARMs history, Acorn were building computers and designing CPUs before they spun out the CPU design portion.

Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture, that was a decade of design and manufacturing already, they VC'ed the independence of the CPU. The staffing and knowledge came from Acorn.

> Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture

I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489

Oh, I was just wanting to clarify the "Apple co-founded".

They had the Newton project, found ARM did a better job than the other options, but there were a few missing pieces. They funded the spun out project so they could throw ARM a few new requirements for the CPU design.

As a "cofounder" of ARM, they didn't contribute technical experience and the architecture did already exist.

Sigh. Newton. So far ahead of it's time.

Absolutely.

There are nearly 2B smartphones sold each year and only 200M laptops, so Apple's 20M laptop sales are basically a rounding error and not worth considering.

As 15-16% of the smartphone market, Apple is generally selling around 300m phones. I've read that Qualcomm is usually around 25-35% of the smartphone market which would be 500-700M phones.

But Qualcomm almost certainly includes ARM processors in their modems which bumps up those numbers dramatically. Qualcomm also sells ARM chips in the MCU/DSP markets IIRC.

Qualcomm's modems aren't ARM processors, they're Hexagon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon

Qualcomm may have the market but Apple has the profit.