The other bigger reason why they are doing this is that it removes having to deal with licensing and using any Qualcomm provided firmware & hardware designs. It

The other bigger reason why they are doing this is that it removes having to deal with licensing and using any Qualcomm provided firmware & hardware designs. It doesn't quite free them from having to license any patents probably. But other than that, they no longer have to deal with anything Qualcomm on the critical path to shipping hardware & software. Depending on what their patent licensing with Qualcomm looks like, this also might free them up to embed 5G capabilities in just about any other device they have that isn't a phone. Combined with soft sims, there's no need for sim card slots even. Think laptops, vr goggles, apple tv's, watches, etc. That stuff is/was mostly blocked on licensing and Qualcomm taking a cut; and only partially on power requirements. I wouldn't be surprised to see the C1 in some future mac books. In fact I'd be surprised if that didn't happen. Some Chinese phone companies like Huawei have been doing similar things and use their own chips rather than Qualcomm provided ones and of course the whole notion of Qualcomm enforcing their patents in China is not much of a thing. It will be interesting to see what happens with 6G and beyond. That will be the first standard where Qualcomm has to compete with multiple competitors competing on quality and features. Apple won't wait for them to do whatever. And likewise, companies like Ericsson/Nokia might start talking directly to Apple about making sure their network infrastructure works great with IOS.