The "nothing" probably refers to royalties which is true for architectural licensees like Apple. They instead pay for that license which is not sold per-CPU.
> Apple pays nothing, because they do not license ARM cores in any way, instead having a full royalty-free license for ARM ISA (and afaik covering updates too) since before ARM got big.
I will admit to being a bit hyperbolic there. Compared to normal ARM licensing, it's way less.
Meanwhile I recall start of RISC-V hype being, among other things, Western Digital dropping a ton of investment money into it just to escape ARM license costs.
