> when AMD was Apple's supplier, it wasn't really visible in their sales, so I assume Apple might have bargained for negligible-margin
> pricing. ... Nvidia simply wasn't desperate to accept that, or even didn't tolerate that treatment with a nice face.

Right now, Apple and Nvidia are both doing great without each other. While Nvidia is supply constrained, they have no motivation to sell the H100 to Apple for less than their usual margin. If the world economy goes into a 1930s type of depression, that could create the conditions for Apple and Nvidia to work together.

Apple makes more than half their revenue from iPhones. Anything that increases iPhone sales is of great interest to them. If the world economy is in a depression, introducing a new color iPhone will not be enough to motivate consumers to buy one. If Apple wants developers to use the Neural Engine in iPhones, Apple needs to provide a viable solution for neural net training. Apple could get the hardware from someone other than Nvidia. The more difficult and time-consuming part would be getting the software. Under these conditions, I can imagine Apple and Nvidia working together, especially if Nvidia’s Grace CPU has some problems.