Spectacular failure is not generous. I would say Apple is doing the right thing. They want to develop their own vertical stack for their hardware. Even if the current endeavor is unsuccessful, they're building the skill set to do it in the future. Let's not forget Apple has a massive global phone footprint, so they're a massive consumer of these cellular modems.
Even if they don't have the chip ready to go at this moment, it gives them negotiating leverage with the modem manufacturer, namely Qualcomm. Having a thousand engineers, billions of dollars invested, and prototypes going on... That's negotiation leverage. Many business deals are done by capabilities, so if you're developing a capability you might get a better deal, so you don't accelerate that capability is growth.
Not to mention if Apple builds their own modem silicon, they would be in a position to sell it to other people.
I think this is just a reasonable business development, the article is breathless and over the top, I would expect nothing less from any extremely large organization, to at least try to bring feature parity in their own pipeline even if it's more expensive, it's a good option to have on the back burner.
