The alternative is Intel dissolving their R&D completely since they couldn't see how the division could ever be profitable. At least with Apple acquiring them there's still some competition left in the field.
It remains marginally higher competition than the unit folding, which seems to have been the alternative. At least one party has an alternative. And unlikely as it may seem, that party may yet choose to sell to others, which is also better than zero.
Also if political winds blow against the FAANGs and pushes for breakups of some sort gain ground, that could take the form of something like compulsory licensing of closely held IP by Apple. Pure speculation of course, but the prospect of competition due to his acquisition is non-zero, compared to the zero of Intel dissolution.
There are 5 or more independent modem developers in China. If you add to that that 5G was mostly a Chinese thing, I can confidently say that at least in 5G space, Qualcomm is nowhere near a monopolist now.
Qualcomm is pretty much an Intel of modem world. Their stuff is quite good, but their commercial terms are beyond a robbery, and you simply don't play in this space if you are a <100m company according to them.
Modems are no rocket science, and QCM made itself the juiciest target for Chinese.
If people have good memory here, at around 2012 Chinese company called Allwinner was steamrolling Qualcomm in its home field - application processors for mobile electronics.
Allwinner's only weak side was poor 3G integration, and they were about to finally solve it with their "phablet" solution with single package ram+soc+3rd party baseband combo.
Then, something strange happened: every mention of Phablet vanished from their website, and a month later they announced some vaguely termed "deal" with Qualcomm, after which a lot of their senior managers quit the company and left China for fancy life in the West...
There is a speculation in Shenzhen that they were basically bought off by Qualcomm.
Now with 5+ more contenders, I doubt they will be able to buy off all of them, especially when Huawei is involved.
This is, by far, my biggest concern with this acquisition. In markets where the iPhone is the major revenue driver, what incentive will carriers have to optimize their network for non-iPhone modems? I can easily see the US carriers neglecting Qualcomm modems to the point where if you want the best cellular experience, you have to use an iPhone.
That's definitely true, but I suspect that when you filter down to postpaid unlimited data plans (likely the customers with the highest margins), the iPhone's share of the market increases considerably.
Apple drives the bulk of application sales revenue for sure. They probably represent a large plurality of phone hardware sales. I don't think they represent a sigificant chunk of carrier revenue though. An iPhone contract doesn't make them any more money than a junky Huawei one.
Is the iPhone the major revenue driver for any carrier? What matters to the carrier is the plan they can sell you, not the price of the phone you're using with that plan. I could believe that iPhone users on average have more expensive plans (due to being less price sensitive), but in most markets Android has the dominant market share.
Edit: I suppose carriers are regional, so the iPhone might be the major revenue driver in the US, but Android can't be too far behind. Neglecting 40% of your userbase doesn't seem like good business.
iOS has < 50% market share in the US, and I think that's still where they have their highest market share. There should be no risk of other hardware platforms left as second class citizens under that status quo.
If Apple brought the design/implementation of their modems in house, as they have with much of their chipset design, and as a result Intel ceased pursuing the modem business, because they'd lost their biggest customer, would your concerns be the same?
Yeah, I mean I'm happy there may still be another player in the 5g space, but it's really really unlikely Apple will turn OEM and provide market competition the way Intel might have.
Here's to hoping this succeeds and Apple spins off the company to meet the demand of other manufacturers, similar to how it was involved with founding ARM Holdings.