The latter, almost everyone wants to use a phone with a qualcomm chipset, because most app and game developers almost never bother to optimise their software for mediatek processors.

I think it could be because about 10 years ago, mediatek didn’t really have any SOCs that could compete with the qualcomm flagships, therefore confining themselves to the budget phone category. Which is what earned mediatek SOCs the reputation of being slow.

That started to change with the release of their dimensity line of SOCs which matched or in some cases even surpassed the performance of Qualcomm flagships but the public perception of mediatek has only recently started changing. Hopefully we see more people buying mediatek SOC based phones so developers have some incentive to optimise their apps for it.

How does it being 2024 justify not having a headphone jack. Most other phones competing with the phone 1 do have a headphone jack fyi.