this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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Hardware

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How Qualcomm built a mobile empire (and will it last?) (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 1 week ago by GreenEngineering3475 to c/hardware
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Qualcomm is synonymous with top-tier smartphone performance these days, but the market was once much more competitive.

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[โ€“] Alphane_Moon 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I think one of the more long-term threats to Qualcomm is the relative decline in importance of gen on gen improvements in mobile networking and smartphone AP performance.

3G to 4G was a massive change. It made many application on smartphones actually viable. While we don't have 5G where I live, I get the impression that it's not that big of a jump. I have yet to see any mass market application that require 5G.

Same with smartphone CPU performance, while there is still a lot of room for further developments (particularly in efficiency/battery life), modern smartphones are a mature product category. Most smartphones users do not need a top of the line smartphone CPU. Not to mention replacement cycle lengths are trending upwards, 3+ year upgrade cycles are becoming much more common.

I am skeptical about Windows on Arm, we have yet to see any substantive real world benefits (i.e. not just benchmarks) for Snapdragon Elite X laptops. It's basically the same thing as buying a modern x86 laptop, but with more problems.

[โ€“] GreenEngineering3475 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Another threat is Apple's in-house modem(if it succeeds and is currently trending in that direction). That's a sizeable market share lost in the smartphone, which Qualcomm has come to dominate.