The only market I can think of where higher prices wouldn't be as much of an issue is the server market. Imagine that. High density, Apple designed, ARM SOCs for servers. Or maybe they'll bring back Xserve.
But if you look at their chip design road map they started with an ARM Soc, now they have a motion co-processor, integrated graphics, and an ML chip. The road map of their SoC has been to specialize towards phone applications exclusively, the majority of that stuff just wouldn't make any sense in a server.
So what you're asking is not only for them to sell their IP to 3rd parties (a business model of partners they've repeatedly crushed) but also to build out an entirely separate chip design team focused on a new market.
On the other hand, servers are running more GPU / ML workloads these days and semiconductor designs are more automated. It’d be interesting to see if they could cost-effectively sell those designs with, perhaps, capacity tweaks similar to what they’ve done with the iPad X-series releases where the chip design is very similar but they’ve added extra GPU cores, cache, etc.
That’d also be consistent with their past history of trying to pick some edge for a particular market: optimized for media processing, ML, VR/AR, etc. rather than just competing with x86 for the generic workloads. I still don’t see it as a high probability but I’d expect a niche if it happens at all.
That would be awesome, but it’s difficult to see how that would fit in with Nintendo’s vision, which seems to be merging console and mobile gaming. How do you do that without competing directly with iPhone/iPad?
Most of Nintendo's hardware obsession ends up being accessories more than core system tech. I would like to believe that Nintendo bringing ideas for hardware with Apple executing would work really well. Plus, Apple could use a bit more, "Friendly for children aesthetic" and not so much "Future Techno Glass World".
So what you're asking is not only for them to sell their IP to 3rd parties (a business model of partners they've repeatedly crushed) but also to build out an entirely separate chip design team focused on a new market.