Apple has been in the same position as Samsung for a while; both companies take other peoples' CPU and GPU core designs and integrate them into an SoC (A5 and Exynos, respectively). This would put them more in the same field as Qualcomm, which designs its own ARM cores using an ARM architecture license. It looks like this is what Apple is now doing too.
Kind of? There's been in house vlsi & soc at apple forever. Theyve had in house mobile CPU & graphics talent for a couple years at this point. Go check out the stuff Intrinsity was doing as a cash starved startup. Then extrapolate that same team being a well funded semi autonomous design group inside apple.
