> But manufacturers are not going to use a wifi chip maker known to be repeatedly exploited, because of end user perception.
How many of your non-professionally-technical friends could tell you the manufacturer of their WiFi chip? Is it on the box? Could they even tell you who Broadcom is?
"Intel NIC" only recently became a very minor selling point in enthusiast desktop motherboards. I'm not holding out hope this is going to follow a more informed curve.
The gatekeepers (manufacturers) are the only ones informed enough to make the decision en mass. And they're not going to do so without a market reason. So barring something like "Broadcom stops providing security updates" or "New law holds device manufacturers liable for security bugs" they're going to save the few cents on BoM and continue using them.
I agree, but these things go up the chain. Sure people won't say 'I wont buy broadcom', or 'i wont buy snapdragon.' But they will say 'I won't buy PhoneCoXYZ because they were in the news for being hacked.' Not after this necessarily, but after enough times, I think we'll see it.
I'd like to move more towards this. And the branding and identification is probably a big part of this. Pushing news to report the culpable parties by name. "Samsung / Google / Apple recently had a flaw in their {model} phone" vs "Another phone vulnerability" desensitization.
I've seen some manufacturers start to advertise which WiFi chipset a laptop has. For example, Qualcomm Atheros cards are now marketed as "Killer," and Intel Wifi cards are often referenced by model number in laptop specs.
How many of your non-professionally-technical friends could tell you the manufacturer of their WiFi chip? Is it on the box? Could they even tell you who Broadcom is?
"Intel NIC" only recently became a very minor selling point in enthusiast desktop motherboards. I'm not holding out hope this is going to follow a more informed curve.
The gatekeepers (manufacturers) are the only ones informed enough to make the decision en mass. And they're not going to do so without a market reason. So barring something like "Broadcom stops providing security updates" or "New law holds device manufacturers liable for security bugs" they're going to save the few cents on BoM and continue using them.