Prepare your wallets! Qualcomm hints that Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 could be more costly

The prices of our smartphones seem to be going up over the years and there are plenty of reasons for it, but come 2025, it seems that one of those reasons could be the use of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset, which is expected to power the majority of flagship phones launching that year.

This is according to a report from Android Authority based on an answer that Qualcomm had given in response to a question. During the Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm revealed that its next-gen chipset following the recently-announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, would be powered by custom Oryon CPU cores.

Qualcomm senior vice president Chris Patrick later suggested that due to the use of these custom CPU cores, it could result in costs for making the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 to be higher. Since we doubt that smartphone makers will be absorbing these costs on behalf of their customers, it means that those cost increases will be passed on to consumers instead.

It is unclear how much more expensive we're talking about and it would be hard to tell. Different companies have different deals with their suppliers, where those who order a higher volume might be eligible for a bigger discount, but either way, 2024 might be a better year to upgrade your smartphone if you're not looking forward to paying more in 2025.