MediaTek consistently offers far more value/$, which makes them seem less concerning. For a while they were second tier offerings, but increasingly, they're just fantastic pieces of equipment. The Retroid Pocket 4+ was announced today with the Dimensity 1100 processor - 4x A78 cores, 9 GPU cores - and it looks like a super tight mini-Deck; $200.
Beyond a value assessment, if you look at who licenses whose patents, it's MediaTek paying handsomely to license a ton of Qualcomm patents. That happened in November 2009. I wonder how many new patents MediaTek has had to license to keep going, versus how many they're 3/4 of the way to done having to license.
I truly like your point! I think a reversal of perspective is totally due here. But so far, MediaTek has been winning marketshare imho by playing a hella competitive game, where-as Qualcomm seems to be ultra expensive chips that consistently under-deliver on their promises. MediaTek also seems to be available in a wider range of systems, where-as Qualcomm chips seem to only be available on a very limited range of products. I wish Qualcomm was at least more competitive; the 8cx series could have been a value chip, but was hot and systems were still far too expensive.
