Plus, AWS/Google are also actively gobbling up silicon design talent to fight Intel and AMD on the server area, which is a problem as designing powerful server cores is way easier than designing SoCs for mobile devices.
If we assume Qualcomm is trying as hard as they can, what's their alternative? Ship nothing? Commit corporate suicide in shame?
I guess I'm saying that it doesn't seem like Qualcomm is putting in as much effort as they should. It should be embarrassing for them.
Faster chips also mean more expensive chips, which would erode their price competitiveness against the iPhone especially since they don't have the volumes of the iPhone. In particular A series chips have huge and higher spec caches compared to the Qualcomm chips, which take a lot of die space, which is the prime factor in chip costs.
Finally, for Qualcomm to bring out a super-premium A series killer they would have to know, for a fact, that all the Android manufacturers would adopt it. If they didn't the per-unit costs would make them prohibitively expensive. They just don't have the guaranteed volumes. If enough manufacturers passed, the project would be a financial disaster. It's just too risky.
Isn't open source supposed to solve for this? What was stopping them from updating the OS along with their hardware? The only reasons I can think of are unkind enough that I'll not list them, but I'd love to hear if there's a good reason I missed.
The transition only works well if both the software and hardware are upgraded in tandem. For Apple this is no problem, but for the rest of the industry you have to be willing to put a lot of work into a product that won't do anything until the other side catches up. It's much more risky. The general sense seemed to be that they were waiting for memory sizes to grow large enough to force the issue until Apple just went ahead and quietly pulled the trigger.
What is less forgivable is just how much of a performance gap the Android market is seemingly willing to tolerate between the latest A* series chip and whatever the fastest Android chip is. How is Qualcomm not terminally embarrassed to announce brand new chips that are two years behind what Apple is currently shipping?