Item — HN Reader

>ten years is a very long time in technology,

10 years is relatively short time in hardware, that is only at best 4 cycles. In today's world it is only 3 cycles. The amount of time, energy and resources required to switch from ARM to RISC-V only to save $100M a year makes very little sense. That is assuming you can get the same performance switching over in the first place. Which right now isn't the case in the next 5 years.

And I wouldn't be surprised ARM gives Apple some other patents protection as well as discount on other IPs.

Well you can see from the original poster's timeline, that 10 years from now will be effectively 16 years into Apple's ARM journey, so you can add two more cycles.

And also from the timeline you can see that the average Apple hardware transition period is 2.75 cycles, so I wouldn't bet too much that their ARM journey will last more than 6 cycles.