Having margins because no one can legally compete with you is pretty remarkable in the chip industry. No one else has carved out such a large market like this.
The other bit that blows me away is that sometimes it feels like Qualcomm's perpetual inability to integrate chips is a vast submarine point no one using Qualcomm sees coming, but which forever works out in Qualcomm's favor. I don't know how many chips a MediaTek cellular modem takes, but iPhone 15 pro has 6+ chips dedicated to cellular, probably more. Modem, two transceivers, an envelope tracker, and probably a bunch of in this case non-qualcomm power supplies but most probably use Qualcomm pmics, maybe plural. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+15+Pro+Max+Chip+ID/16532... . There's also separate but non-Qualcomm solutions for wifi & bt too, where-as again I rather expect a company like MediaTek has much more working together.
I'm really interested to see chip identifications of the upcoming desktop/server class Qualcomm Oryon, supposedly by the Nuvia team (one of the strongest possible cases for anti-trust I have ever seen). https://www.semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-... is not partial journalism, but this cavalcade of ridiculousness is entirely the sort of poorly integrated Qualcomm solution I'd expect, that both builds terrible terrible products but which also lets Qualcomm fail upwards by requiring 5x more board components than is reasonable. Terrible for consumers, OEMs are in tears, but oh sorry, your design is late hot over priced and seemed reasonable but you're going to have to add a bunch more pmic's to get to market because we are Qualcomm and we spend more on lawyers than design.
The other bit that blows me away is that sometimes it feels like Qualcomm's perpetual inability to integrate chips is a vast submarine point no one using Qualcomm sees coming, but which forever works out in Qualcomm's favor. I don't know how many chips a MediaTek cellular modem takes, but iPhone 15 pro has 6+ chips dedicated to cellular, probably more. Modem, two transceivers, an envelope tracker, and probably a bunch of in this case non-qualcomm power supplies but most probably use Qualcomm pmics, maybe plural. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+15+Pro+Max+Chip+ID/16532... . There's also separate but non-Qualcomm solutions for wifi & bt too, where-as again I rather expect a company like MediaTek has much more working together.
I'm really interested to see chip identifications of the upcoming desktop/server class Qualcomm Oryon, supposedly by the Nuvia team (one of the strongest possible cases for anti-trust I have ever seen). https://www.semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-... is not partial journalism, but this cavalcade of ridiculousness is entirely the sort of poorly integrated Qualcomm solution I'd expect, that both builds terrible terrible products but which also lets Qualcomm fail upwards by requiring 5x more board components than is reasonable. Terrible for consumers, OEMs are in tears, but oh sorry, your design is late hot over priced and seemed reasonable but you're going to have to add a bunch more pmic's to get to market because we are Qualcomm and we spend more on lawyers than design.