India, Feb. 20 -- This is definitely history repeating itself. As I write this on Wednesday (IST), Qualcomm may be feeling what Intel did in the November of 2020 when Apple released the M1 chip. The new Apple iPhone 16e, a truly compact iPhone in a while (iPhone SE was in 2022 and the iPhone 13 mini in 2021), crucially begins an era of Apple's own cellular modem. The C1 modem replaces Qualcomm's chips in the iPhone 16e. Considering the iPhone refresh cycle usually is much simpler, we could find Qualcomm's hardware gone once the next generation iPhones come around later this year.

If we go back to the release of the M1 with the MacBook Air and then the MacBook Pro series in late 2020, it took just about a years' time for the elaborate Mac...