FWIW, if Apple wanted to maximize long-term benefit (not saying they are, but also am not wanting to say they aren't), even if there were no benefit from doing

FWIW, if Apple wanted to maximize long-term benefit (not saying they are, but also am not wanting to say they aren't), even if there were no benefit from doing this (which I actually doubt) and even if there were no price reduction, they would still get around to doing this action as it would let them invest more money later into engineers that work on things they care about, as opposed to things Qualcomm cares about, and hopefully/maybe that correlates with things you/I care about.