[spijdar]

This isn't a direct response per se, but your comments made me think of some relevant background.

Apple has been deeply involved with ARM almost since the beginning. Allegedly, the acronym "ARM" was changed from "Acorn RISC Machine" to "Advanced RISC Machine" at the behest of Apple, and their engineers seem to have been involved soon after the first ARM chip was created for internal use in Acorn's computers, making modifications to the chip and ISA to make it suitable for the Newton, their combined efforts creating the first commercially released ARM chip, the ARM6.

More recently, Apple has done a lot of work with LLVM. They weren't the original authors, but they've effectively created a lot of their own tooling.

All this to say, while they did license ARM, and they did start with someone else's tooling, they were so deeply involved in the origin/growth of both I think you may be underselling their involvement/work. If they didn't already have such deep historical ties to ARM, I suspect they would have seriously considered making their own architecture.

[duskwuff]

As it so happens, Apple did consider making their own CPU architecture in the late 1980s:

https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture