Tech Crunch reported the below. Personally, I don't think Steve Jobs would do this but they are right that the impact would be huge--like an asteroid hitting the cell phone industry--leaving a big hole in the ground. Details of ARM's financials are here:

The following is very much a rumor, but if true, it would be absolutely huge. A UK publication is reporting that Apple is considering buying ARM Holdings — aka, the company behind most of the world’s mobile phone processors. If Apple were to buy them, it would likely reshape the mobile landscape completely.

To be clear, London’s Evening Standard is only citing “gossips” within the city’s financial district. But those gossips aren’t the only ones convinced there is something to this talk: ARM’s shares went up 8.1 points today, with more than 5 million shares changing hands by midday, the paper reports. The deal, would apparently see Apple buying ARM for something in the neighborhood of 5.2 billion British pounds, or roughly $8 billion in U.S. dollars....

And if they did this, it would mean that almost all of Apple’s main competitors would likely have to find new chips to power their devices. While ARM doesn’t make the chips itself, it licenses out its technology to others who make the chips that go into Nokia, Sony, Samsung, HTC, and many, many other phones. This includes the iPhone and even the iPad, whose custom A4 chip is still based on ARM architecture. This also, obviously, includes phones that run Google’s Android software.