Devices like the iPhone 15 and MacBook Air use Apple-designed chips, built by TSMC, and they're fast. Very fast, especially for mobile chips that are designed to be performant while still sipping at battery power in ways that competing chips from companies like AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel have historically been unable to manage. The transition of the Mac away from Intel chips and towards Apple's own chips has been a resounding success. But none of that would have been possible without Arm, a British company bought by SoftBank for a cool $32 billion back in 2016.
Arm is a company that quietly helps power some of the most-used devices on the planet, and it could have an important part to play in the devices that we all use moving into a new world of autonomous vehicles and other futuristic technology. It does that by designing chips and then licensing those designs out to other companies. Other licenses are for the core technology so companies can then build on that with their own ideas, much like Apple and its deal. And it's that deal that is under the spotlight right now after a new report shared previously unknown details about a deal that is incredibly good value for the iPhone maker — and terrible for Arm.
