So the reason Apple would buy Arm is to save itself money on the architecture license in the long run, right? But it could also save money on the architecture

So the reason Apple would buy Arm is to save itself money on the architecture license in the long run, right? But it could also save money on the architecture license if it switched to RISC-V. And you can be sure there's a tightly guarded spreadsheet somewhere inside Apple that models whether or not switching to RISC-V is a good idea. Of course, Arm can figure all that out too, so somewhere inside Arm they've tried to replicate Apple's "should we switch to RISC-V" spreadsheet, and Arm sets the price of the architecture license so that the spreadsheet will always say "don't switch to RISC-V". The other thing to consider: Arm's core design business is quite valuable; probably more valuable than their architecture business. But Apple does their own core design, and would not be interested in selling core IP to others, so they would get no value from that business. But if they were to buy Arm, they'd still have to pay for it.