Apple suggests it won't sell Apple silicon to other companies

Pressed about the forthcoming Apple silicon during Apple's Q3 2020 earnings call, Cook declined to say that the company would never sell its technology to other firms. However, he came as close to outright saying no as Apple ever does on these legally-mandated calls.

"I don't want to make a forever comment," he replied to an analyst question, "but we're a product company, and we love making the whole thing."

Asked specifically whether Apple would consider monetizing the technology and becoming what the analyst called a "merchant silicon monger," Cook chose to elaborate on why the company has chosen to move away from Intel.

"If we can own the user experience in that way, [our goal is] delighting the user," he said. "And that's the reason that we're doing Apple Silicon, because we can envision some products that we couldn't achieve otherwise. And so that's how we look at it."

Cook also responded to a more general question about the perceived benefits of moving to Apple Silicon. "What we would end up with is a common architecture across all of our products," he said, "which gives us some interesting things that we can do."

"[It] sort of unleashes another round of innovation," he continued, "and so I don't want to say a lot about it, other than we're extremely excited about it."