I feel the same way about LTE myself, but they can still sell to T-mobile and most non-US markets, at least. For a while there everyone had to go Qualcomm to do

I feel the same way about LTE myself, but they can still sell to T-mobile and most non-US markets, at least. For a while there everyone had to go Qualcomm to do LTE, which made the price very high. Only recently did Samsung manage to pair their Exynos processor with LTE and HTC managed to pair NVIDIA with LTE. The generation before that, HTC One X used Qualcomm in the US and NVIDIA in world wide edition, and Samsung also had a Qualcomm entry. Apple famously just took a really long time to go LTE. Samsung and HTC work very hard to get into carrier stores, and in the US that means LTE, so they were pretty much forced to adopt it before it was cheap and different options were competing with each other.