Feels like you're rewriting history, to me. Smartphone SoCs are not hugely profitable, and a big point of the past 10 years were Chinese manufacturers entirely

Feels like you're rewriting history, to me. Smartphone SoCs are not hugely profitable, and a big point of the past 10 years were Chinese manufacturers entirely ignoring ARM IP to increase profits. The only people that make money off ARM hardware are the export-officiated manufacturers that don't pay per-unit licenses; which is exclusively Apple. Nobody else has a more permissive ARM architecture license, not even Nvidia. Intel at the time was fabless, would have needed to license or design a RISC architecture, and would have ended up just as squeezed as any other part of Apple's supply chain. And if Intel made a serious profit, Apple would have replaced them anyways. It's an all-risk-no-reward scenario.