You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datashee

You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware, and driver. If you hack that into something good, your product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy some chips off the back of a truck in Shenzhen, solder them onto some circuit board you built in your garage, and use the three-years-out-of-date reference drivers written in a day by some random intern, the results will not be as good. Apple, I assume, uses the first approach when working with hardware vendors. The WiFi card you got for $3 on Amazon probably doesn't. Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.