While I love Commodore, the analogy breaks down. MOS had their own fab, which allowed them to do lightning-fast turnaround. If Apple bought a fab today, you should short their stock because that is a low-margin, cash-hungry business.

The VIC-II was apparently built so quickly without simulation tools because they fabbed custom test runs of individual parts of the chip with debug logic added. This "unit-test" style development had chip spins coming out in 2 weeks.

Nowadays, you do this with simulation or an FPGA.

This isn't really new for Apple. They used to own a sizeable chunk of ARM (26% if memory serves) back in the days of Newton but ended up selling out.

Now they own an ARM licensee.

They also used to be a major player in the PowerPC line.