I guarantee that's the plan. Apple backed up the money truck to establish a chip design house which is is probably second only to Intel, paid for a license to develop their own completely unique designs based on ARM technology, a license nobody else in the world has BTW, and establish Samsung's state of the art chip foundry (also probably second only to Intel) to produce them.

But you know what Apple doesn't want any more? They absolutely can't stand the idea of being dependent on Samsung for all their processors. The problem is there simply aren't that many foundries in the world capable of producing a chip like that in large enough quantities and Apple doesn't want a partnership like the one they had with Samsung that went south leaving Samsung with one of the most advanced manufacturing operations in the world and Apple forced to contract them to make their chips because of it.

They tried to buy a big stake in a Taiwanese company (TSMC) but the owners didn't want to sell (hard to blame them) and apparently they also didn't want to dedicate an entire foundry to a single customer's chips, which is a key component of Apple's deal with Samsung. Until they figure out a way to cut Samsung out of the processor manufacturing picture I suspect they will resist making the move as long as possible.

Personally I think the whole thing is stupid. I mean partly it's stupid because Apple should have realized that Samsung was probably going to get more out of the investment in the foundry. That's what Samsung does. They focus on manufacturing, establish a partnership with a company like Apple or Sony who needs their expertise, and eventually the partnership is dissolved when the partner walks away with almost nothing and Samsung laughs all the way from the factory their partner paid for at least half of to the bank.

But what's stupider is for Apple to walk away. As soon as they're gone all that chip manufacturing know how gets repurposed at least partly to compete with their products. Apple's execs need to stop whining about having one of the top foundries in the world locked up as their exclusive manufacturing partner and get on with their plan to convert everything to their own processors.

And running OS X on those chips is not at all far fetched by the way. First of all their chips are quite a bit more sophisticated than other ARM chips and I believe Samsung's foundry is (once again) second only to Intel when it comes to miniaturization (manufacturing process size). Even chips from companies like Qualcomm and nVidia are getting close to the point where they are suitable for workstations. We're already in the age of 64-bit ARM.

Besides, OS X isn't all that far off from iOS. Yeah there are more bells and whistles in the interface and a more expansive set of libraries to build software around. But deep down OS X is (semi-FreeBSD) UNIX and that's why it scaled down so well to produce iOS. The processors are getting faster and smaller and the onboard graphics more sophisticated. At this point the biggest obstacle isn't whether they can do it so much as how sure they are about when, how fast, and how much the two operating systems should converge and what sort of devices they will be making in 2 or 3 or 5 years.

That's where they really miss Steve Jobs. He was not, as a lot of people like to suggest, some visionary genius who saw the future. Actually he was something much more impressive IMO. He was the guy who could look at what you made from the average consumer's perspective and tell you if it was done or not. And more often than not he was right. If it wasn't ready he couldn't tell you what it needed or what you should do next, but he knew if it wasn't there yet.

Personally I think his secret was the fact that he didn't really love technology. He just loved what it could do and in my experience that's true of most people. Whatever it was I think they're in for some rough sledding in the next few years with the direction they've taken so if they're smart they'll make nice with Samsung and try to focus on all the competition that's catching up to them.