Huh, that was quick. Seems like manufacturers weren’t cooperating, and then T-Mobile announced the Starlink partnership. Maybe they realized they just couldn’t compete with that, so they pulled the plug.
Oh well, I for one was nervous about another Qualcomm proprietary thing becoming the standard; we’ve had quite enough of their anti-competitive bullshit recently. As evidenced by Apple absolutely spanking Qualcomm with their A-series chips’ power efficiency for several years now. Embarassing time to be an Android fanboy.
Right, and they’ve had a near monopoly on US Android phones for like two decades now. In processors and modems. They’ve gotten fucking lazy, and they’re holding Android back.
Yes, and my argument is that the lack of chipset diversity is holding the platform back. More recently, Google’s doing interesting stuff with Tensor and Mediatek apparently made some decent SoC’s. But Qualcomm still has way too much of the (US) market.
That’s patently false. Ever since Apple introduced their own silicon (A4 released in 2010), they’ve generally had the best performance of any ARM chip. It’s not that the competition is bad, it’s just Apple has historically been excellent at recruiting top engineers and executing their products. For example, in the Intel-era, there were multiple years publications said the best Windows laptop was a Mac.