theworm

Providing modem chips at a competitive price for a single-digit percentage of the market-in-units is not a trivial business, but it's not particularly important to Qualcomm's bottom line.  What is a big deal to Qualcomm's bottom line is the money it gets for patent licensing on percentage-of-phone-price terms, given that Apple is half of the cellphone market by revenue.  And that license revenue they get to collect whether or not Apple uses their chips . . . if they win their lawsuit.  (And it includes a whole lot of patents, including on things that have nothing to do with modems.)

So, yeah, nobody at Qualcomm was going to compromise what is probably the single largest source of corporate profits in order to keep a few percentage points of a lower-margin business.