That's true. Forgot they exited the market. mediatek has no problems selling arm phones. Qualcomm has only 50% of market share in that space and there are plenty of other competitors. Unlike the x86 server market.
Samsung, Intel and Apple have enough cash and tech clout to crush Qualcomm into dust if they really wanted to compete on r&d.
Throwing a few million at a lawsuit is just a negotiation tactic.
Qualcomm would still be likely to participate in any future standard and would likely still have contributing patents. If they aren't going to license it now under FRAND then why would they do so in the future ? Whether Intel, Samsung, Apple et al contribute more to the standard is irrelevant.
Also Mediatek and Qualcomm have their own patent sharing agreement:
My opinion is that since apple is making 40b a year on iPhone sales, 50% of Qualcomms market cap a year, then Qualcomm is charging Apple a fair and reasonable price. If qualcomm chose not to be part of the LTE standard, those patents would still be enforceable, and they could charge whatever they want, like they did with wcdma.
I think legally FRAND is defined ambiguous enough that many kinds of pricing schemes are acceptable, so there is nothing illegal with qualcomm charging a percentage of device cost.
My point on bringing up MediaTek was that if Apple wants a discount, they can cross license with Qualcomm, like other companies have. Intel can offer Qualcomm it's fabs, or x86, or server patents. Qualcomms pricing has not been so unfair or prohibitive as to prevent small or large players from making a mountain of profits from the cellular device market.
I own stock in both Qualcomm and Apple, so I feel like they are both wasting money on lawyers instaead of engineers :).
