> And Mediatek? Oof. I assume the SOC comes pre compromised out of the box.
If by compromised you mean “china bad”, mediatek is taiwanese not chinese. Same home as asus, asrock, tsmc, htc, acer, d link, adata, biostar, insyde, gskill, foxconn, realtek and many others. From the chip to bios in your pc probably.
If you mean quality, they make efficient and more powerful chipsets especially gpu wise compared to qualcomm. Most probably only know it from cheap chinese phones.
no, not calling "china bad", calling out all the SOCs they had some pretty glaring exploit holes on that a bunch of stupid OEMs kept shipping long after the holes were well known. i've also had a pretty bad time with a lot of their wifi chipsets on our networks, but hey.
MediaTek used to supply a lot of lower-performance MIPS and ARM chips during 2010s. GP probably has that MediaTek == bad experience association. The actual chips weren't unreliable or horribly engineered, just slow, but people don't make a clear distinction there.