Eh, I'm not so sure it'll be that big a deal. The whole supply chain is so twisted and tangled all the way up and down. Shuffling out one piece doesn't seem like it will, on its own, be so major. Samsung made the chips for the iPhone, then made their own phone, then Apple designed their own chips made by TSMC, now Apple is exploring the possibility of having Samsung make those chips again.
Also, it takes a willful ignorance of history for ARM to claim this is the first time they've manufactured hardware. I mean, maaaaybe, teeeeechnically that's true, but ARM was the Acorn RISC Machine, and Acorn was in the hardware business...at least as much as Apple was for the first iPhone.
Technically right is the best kind of right … right?
I don’t think ARM Ltd have ever done a deal to deliver finished chips to a customer for production use.
They’ve made test silicon and dev. boards.
They designed arguably the first ever SoC (for Acorn) in the form of the ARM250 but Acorn bought the chips from VLSI not ARM.
Not aware of an exception to this rule until now.