Paul Otellini: Intel Lost the iPhone Battle, But It Could Win the Mobile War 117
kenekaplan writes "In an interview with The Atlantic before stepping down as CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini reflects on his decision not to make a chip for the then yet released iPhone. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'"
Apparently... (Score:1)
The takeaway? Always *hear* your gut. (Score:4, Insightful)
What this story tells me is that while your gut instinct may or may not be offering you the best path forward, you owe it to yourself as a business leader to figure out why your gut contradicts the data. If all you do is make logical decisions based on easily available data, then you can probably be replaced by a simple algorithm that can make more reliable decisions than you anyway.
In this case, Otellini had data in front of him, but his gut instinct contradicted the data-driven path forward. He ignored it and moved on, convinced that it was safer (?) to be on the side of the data. But the data led him astray. Why?
Because he had partial data, data that was probably focused on previous mobile computing entries and little on Apple's recent design successes, superior user experiences and marketing capabilities. If he'd realized his gut was really signalling that they needed more and different kinds of data, I suspect Intel would have gone down a different path.
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But at the time, Intel didn't have a mobile processor that sipped energy like ARM's. So what was he going to offer? License ARM...again? Maybe the data told him his processors were dead fish for mobile and that he'd be better off waiting until Intel could catch up.
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Well evidently if he's lamenting not going with his gut, he's implying that there *was* a viable path to producing mobile chips and they *chose* not to risk their desktop/server business in pursuit of it.
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Atom development was neglected for a long time and Intel used to use previous generation manufacturing processes to make Atom. Not exactly what you are supposed to do if you want to have major wins in the mobile market. Intel did it because Atom did not give them the same profit margins as their other processors. However the end result is they are losing share in the CPU market to ARM.
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But at the time, Intel didn't have a mobile processor that sipped energy like ARM's. So what was he going to offer? License ARM...again? Maybe the data told him his processors were dead fish for mobile and that he'd be better off waiting until Intel could catch up.
What do you mean "again" - Intel sold XScale only half a year before the iPhone was announced. Apple must have contacted him about it long before that - the CPU is a central part of the design after all.
Gripping insight (Score:5, Funny)
I usually don't keep up on things like this, so it was nice to see an article that really s
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yet released? (Score:2)
chip for the then yet released iPhone
I have heard the term then yet unreleased but what does then yet released mean? Is this something like flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing?
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chip for the then yet released iPhone
I have heard the term then yet unreleased but what does then yet released mean? Is this something like flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing?
Probably "yet to be released iPhone", but truncated because what's a couple of words here and there?
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I think it's somewhere between after when you decided to use even go want to do look more like, and the part that make you more the even wanted to because I couldn't even has been.
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"then yet "
read at that point in time it was .
Author has his head (Score:1, Insightful)
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The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we've all heard guys tell stories like this. It takes me about 20 seconds before I mentally paint an "L" on their forehead.
The day Steve Jobs stood in front of a room and introduced the Iphone EVERYONE knew this was a game changer. "Today we're going to introduce a new iPod, a phone, and world class web device" As he repeated that line the graphics on the screen merged and the room realized the leaks about three new products were instead one new device. It was a hell of a mis-direction. It wasn't "the mother of all demos" but it was a close second.
Intel knew this was on the way and didn't think it was lightning in a bottle? Their shareholders should be furious.
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Ok. So you've never let something get away from you that turned out to be huge? I'm sadly one of those guys with a big "L" on his forehead. I have a good friend who did a website early on in the history of the web and he made an absolute killing for a guy just turning his hobby into a business. Part of his success really wasn't the site itself but also who he partnered with and
Re:The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:4, Insightful)
>>"So you've never let something get away from you that turned out to be huge?"
Of course. Most people don't run around bragging about it. Warren Buffett used to talk about passing on the chance to own Microsoft (back when he told this story Gates still ran the store).
Steve Jobs bet Apple's future on the iPhone and won. It took stones. He said when he introduced the device it would change they way we make phone calls and it has. You, me, and ~80% of the US market using cell phones at this moment have a smart phone that has been influenced by the design of the iPhone.
Re:The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs just designed the pain out of the iPhone. Long battery life. Just works. No hassle operation. Huge apps. A natural extension to your growing stable of i-stuff.
The herd moved. The CPU? An ARM-- the direct and absolute antithesis of everything Intel stands for. Simple, low-power consumption, RISC, and with easily grafted subsystems.
If Intel did the ARM, it would measure six feet by eleven feet, weigh 900lbs, and use four kilowatts of electricity, and would need to have Microsoft's lipstick on it.
It's maximally disingenuous of Otellini to utter such horse crap. Andy Grove, come out of retirement, would ya?
Re:The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:5, Informative)
"maximally disingenuous"
Good phrase.
Consider how much has changed since the iPhone 1 ~ six years ago.
Apple has nearly done away with the click wheel. In fact most music devices are now touch screen based.
Clamshell and candybar phones are increasingly a rarity, most people have a smart phone or feature phone.
The iPad grew out of the iPhone and now has dozens of imitators.
The "ebook" grew out of the tablet market pioneered by Apple.
The laptop market has been overtaken by the tablet market.
Tablet and Smart Phones have cut heavily into the handheld game market.
MS decided to glue a touch tablet interface onto it's desktop OS Windows 8. OK, I threw that one in there for laughs.
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1) The Kindle was launched three years before the first iPad.
2) Apple neither invented nor "pioneered" the tablet, either.
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Revisionist history
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The funny thing is he gets modded up by the Apple sycophants as informative when his speech is composed of blatant lies and non-sequiturs.
The modern smart phones are not that different from candy bar phones. The main difference is the size of the screen. In fact they are considered derivatives of the bar format. There were plenty of PDAs with smartphone capability before the iPhone. These include the Mio A701 and a myriad of HTC devices running Windows Mobile. The first smartphone with a touch screen was pr
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Long battery life? Not compared to any smartphone I'd seen. By the way, the original idea for the iPhone was for "apps" to be regular websites, not native code.
It did change a lot of stuff, but it sure as hell wasn't the Jesusphone you seem to think it was.
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I never claimed it was any such thing.
Statistically, however, it's been a huge financial success and propelled Apple's ecosystem to unusual heights, whether you or I like it or not.
Battery life compared to others was pretty good for the data features it provided. Apps had to grow and become part of iTunes financial system. And apps have made some developers very rich and others not so, but their financial ecosystem, awful as it might be, made a lot of millionaires from dev teams. Android has been successful
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Nonsense. Intel used to have an ARM division (bought from DEC). They called it StrongARM, later renamed to XScale. They were basically popular for devices in the same general category as iPhone and iPod Touch. Intel sold off that business to Marvell in 2006 because they thought they could get the power consumption of x86 down enough by 201
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Kind respondent,
You say "Nonsense" when you've just said pretty much everything that I said as an argument to my post. Thanks for the corroboration.
The Atom is a catastrophe in the phone and tablet market. Yes, StrongARM might have had a chance, but DEC didn't invent the 6502 and was only a licensee of ARM-- and DEC had other IP that HP bought and Intel shared over another catastrophe chip, the Itanium. There are a closet full of these things. Intel wanted to control all of the elements, just as Apple has,
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Not at all. You said that if Intel built an ARM chip, it would be a huge beast that draws lots of power. They did build an ARM chip, and it wasn't huge, slow, or high-wattage. It was used in lots of handheld devices for many years, in fact.
Intel builds x86 chips that way because the x86 and x86-64 ISAs are entirely too complex, so they have to build ever-more-complex hardwar
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There's some whoosh going on here, as my tongue was firmly in my cheek.
Yes, somehow Intel convinced HP to use ATOM instead of ARM in Project Moonshot. I notice that HP can't get Moonshot out the door.
It is NOT IN INTEL'S DNA to think about supply chains that aren't invented at INTEL. They are in a ditch of their own making. It's going to take a bunch of ugly quarters to get them really moving again, and much longer to regain thought leadership. By then, we'll have 64core widgets that only a mother could lov
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StrongARM was also used in the Compaq iPAQ devices which were reasonably successful PDA devices at the time. There was even an optional cell phone add-on available for it.
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"Jobs just designed the pain out of the iPhone. Long battery life."
What? I'm not disagreeing with everything else you said, but the iPhone brought in an era of phones that needed charging every night, when before they, including smartphones, lasted a week.
I never saw this as a problem as I always habitually put my phone on charge every night anyway, but I don't see how the iPhone brought in long battery life, it did the complete opposite, it took battery life from a norm of 5 - 10 days down to 1 - 2 days.
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Other phones had long battery life. And they didn't have the processing power. Face it: transistors cost money. Flip phones were marvelous in that they used energy scrupulously.
It took a while to cut that down, and now appsdevs and the core OS makers are very sensitive to optimizing the chipsets.
But yeah, for its functionality levels, the iPhone blew the doors off equivalent-functionality phones.
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I don't disagree that the decreased battery life occured for good reason - you were getting a larger colour screen and so forth, but even if the argument was that battery relative to efficiency of what the device does (rather than simple battery duration) is the argument I'm not terribly convinced the iPhone was in any way ahead here, things like the N95 had much better battery life still and were more powerful devices.
Apple had a lot of problems with batteries for quite some time, all the way upto and incl
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The topic is Intel, so I'll frame it within the reference of a large shift in computing that Otellini missed-- an area of consumer products dominated by smartphones and tablets. Servers have done well, too, but the packaged 1U-5U/generic blade markets haven't done quite so well.
You focus on the iPhone. There's not one high-selling Intel-powered phone or tablet on Earth. Not ONE.
I cited Apple to show how Otellini and Intel in general, though that their domination of the PC industry would make them kings fore
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Uhm, you do realise that Intel had one of the better ARM processors out there back in the PDA days, right? Do some reading on Intel Xscale CPUs. They were in several Palm/WinCE devices, and then Intel sold off the division.
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Uhm, do you realise that Intel sold one of the businesses they owned that had unbelieveable potential? Uhm, do you realize that they, uhm, don't have squat for low power processors and comprehensive consumer platforms? Uhm? Or that they could have uhm, been maybe a leader in uhm, ARM? Uhm?
I uhm, had a Palm and an uhm, HP, and uhm others based on uhm, a processor family that they, uhm, screwed off.
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Intel sold XScale because they thought they could get X86 power consumption down to compete. They did. There are Atom smartphones available now from Lenovo for example and these are still not as integrated as some of the ARM devices. Once Intel gets enough on-chip integration the chips will have similar power consumption characteristics. There is nothing magical about ARM.
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If it's so easy and simple, why is Intel in a ditch?
Put on some cleats when you astroturf.
And no, there isn't anything "magical" about ARM. It's just clever, and not an ecosystem you can control, like Intel likes to control.
Re:The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting but Apple developed iPhone over ~2 - 2.5 years. Depending on when the key players sat with Intel that likely would have been enough time to develop a first generation chip. Apple sold 3 million iPhones it's first year, so the payoff would have been worth it.
Apple met with other vendors who stretched out of their comfort zone - such as Corning to create the first generation Gorilla Glass. Corning had all the reason in the world to play it safe. They had just lost big on photonic technology and were hovering over the junk stock threshold. Corning's closest experience to the iPhone's display was CRT tube glass. Gorilla Glass is now used on 1.5 billion devices around the world.
Peope forget XScale so easily! (Score:3)
Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006 [techspot.com]. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.
That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's
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like Steve Jobs was asking
Also at the time a 'high end' phone was basically a wince box. Intel bet on MS being the king in this play field. Considering the number of wince devices they were moving at the time it was not a bad bet. Apple was a unknown. MS was a known. You can see why they went all in with x86. It was also quite clear Intel wanted out of the phone game at the time. Where all the cool kids were playing with 50 dollar razr flip phones... The high end market was such a low volume it was
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Re:The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree, but that's probably because I'd been using PDAs for a decade prior to the iPhone. Everyone in the PDA business knew that phones and PDAs were going to merge. The only thing they didn't know was if phones were going to pick up PDA features, or if PDAs were going to be able to make calls. In the end, they are both small computers running various programs.
The only game-changer the iPhone brought was that it eschewed hardware number/keyboard entry (and one helluva marketing campaign). Others had toyed with a purely touchscreen interface before, but nobody had bet the entire farm on it like Apple did. (For those taken in by the marketing who believe that the iPhone was the first purely touchscreen phone, google for LG Prada.)
In that way, the iPhone was a lot like the iPod. It was ho-hum in terms of technical features - things which everyone else already had or had tried before. But the interface was a game-changer, and even if they weren't actually the first to market with the idea their massive marketing campaign made it first in people's minds. So I don't really blame Intel for missing the boat. Interface and marketing aren't things you can really appraise prior to a product's release. If Intel judged the iPhone purely on its technical features, it would've looked like any other smartphone with one helluva risky bet on a touchscreen-only keyboard. Just like the technocrati here first saw the iPod and based on its technical features declared, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Re:The girl you should've asked to prom... (Score:5, Insightful)
You could look at Apple's own Newton and see a lineage. PDAs existed before the iPhone and are pretty much a dead market now.
Apple had quite a few of innovations, some created in-house and other purchased. The iPhone has a fantastic interface. Even the earliest iPhone had a quick, responsive interface with excellent graphics. They were first to bring multitouch gestures to a mainstream appliance. As you pointed out they got rid of hardware keys without using garbage like "grafitti". They put a lot of work into a better interface and it shows.
Apple designed their way out of the intimitation factor. They simplified everything down to one button. When grandma gets lost on an iPhone or iPad she knows that one button will always get her unstuck.
I'm not an Apple fanboi, the Galaxy sII and Asus Transformer next to me are proof of that. Android has taken Apple's starting point and improved on things IMHO.
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Ridiculous.
RIM's BlackBerry killed the PDA market. They were long dead before the iPhone was even a rumor.
As for the merging of PDA and cell phone, A Handspring Visor + VisorPhone Springboard module from 2001 is, well, a lot like an iPhone. To see the failure of a product like the Newton (a poor dynabook imitation) as pioneering is to ignore a lot of history.
The iPhone has a fantastic interface.
Not from a UI design perspective. From the ridiculously clunky suite of gestures to the overloaded home button, the iPhone UI is a giant pile of fai
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Just one button
And just one brain cell to know when to press it as well.
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In that way, the iPhone was a lot like the iPod.
The original iPhone was an iPod Touch enhanced with the 3G network and a camera. My wife was looking at getting one but we didn't want the data network. My cousin (an Apple employee at the time) suggested the iPod Touch instead, and then use WiFi+Skype for calls. Now she's looking at an iPad to get the camera (for video calls); but she's been otherwise very happy with her iPod Touch.
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The original iPhone was an iPod Touch enhanced with the 3G network and a camera. My wife was looking at getting one but we didn't want the data network. My cousin (an Apple employee at the time) suggested the iPod Touch instead, and then use WiFi+Skype for calls..
I think it would be more accurate to say "the original iPod Touch was and iPhone without the phone" given the iPhone came to market first (June 2007 vs September 2007).
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Your memory is flawed. iPhone was first. iTouch was created shortly after out of popular demand for an iPod with a iPhone's touch interface.
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I disagree, but that's probably because I'd been using PDAs for a decade prior to the iPhone. Everyone in the PDA business knew that phones and PDAs were going to merge. The only thing they didn't know was if phones were going to pick up PDA features, or if PDAs were going to be able to make calls. In the end, they are both small computers running various programs. The only game-changer the iPhone brought was that it eschewed hardware number/keyboard entry (and one helluva marketing campaign). Others had toyed with a purely touchscreen interface before, but nobody had bet the entire farm on it like Apple did. (For those taken in by the marketing who believe that the iPhone was the first purely touchscreen phone, google for LG Prada.) In that way, the iPhone was a lot like the iPod. It was ho-hum in terms of technical features - things which everyone else already had or had tried before. But the interface was a game-changer, and even if they weren't actually the first to market with the idea their massive marketing campaign made it first in people's minds. So I don't really blame Intel for missing the boat. Interface and marketing aren't things you can really appraise prior to a product's release. If Intel judged the iPhone purely on its technical features, it would've looked like any other smartphone with one helluva risky bet on a touchscreen-only keyboard. Just like the technocrati here first saw the iPod and based on its technical features declared, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
How many PDAs or smart phones in 2007 could leverage the tremendously popular iTunes store? How many had web browsers that could actually display most sites as intended (flash notwithstanding)? To me there were other things that the iPhone brought to the table that could have been used to evaluate its potential.
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Considering iTunes' not working on other devices was due to DRM (mainly), I can't say it's a very positive aspect that only the iPhone could do it.
My smartphones back then did a very good job with what web pages were available back then, no problems there.
The iPhone only really changed two things:
Interfaces got flatter (fewer sub-menus) and touch input replaced physical keyboards and navigation keys.
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Considering iTunes' not working on other devices was due to DRM (mainly), I can't say it's a very positive aspect that only the iPhone could do it.
My smartphones back then did a very good job with what web pages were available back then, no problems there.
The iPhone only really changed two things:
Interfaces got flatter (fewer sub-menus) and touch input replaced physical keyboards and navigation keys.
You're applying your techie values and missing some things. You may see iTunes and associated DRM as a disadvantage but the larger group of consumers doesn't (or didn't). It was a hugely positive aspect and only the iPhone had it. Further, the app store wasn't there at day one but it really helped push the iPhone ahead of everybody else when it did come. This in spite of the fact that lots of techies don't like the walled garden aspect of it. The world is filled with people who don't really care about that
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My candy bar phone back then played MP3s just fine. I do not see what's the big deal with vendor-locked iTunes.
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My candy bar phone back then played MP3s just fine. I do not see what's the big deal with vendor-locked iTunes.
Where did these mp3s you played on your candy bar phone come from and what steps did you have to go through to get them on the phone itself? Could you browse through a library of millions of songs (on the phone) and download them individually or by album? Could you do it legally? What about your non-techie friends and relatives? Even if their phones could play mp3s, did they have any clue as to how to do it?
To be completely accurate, the ability to download songs from the iTunes store straight to the iPh
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You can purchase MP3 legally from Amazon. CD ripping (aka format shifting) has always been legal.
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You can purchase MP3 legally from Amazon. CD ripping (aka format shifting) has always been legal.
You have to remember that we're talking about 7 or 8 years ago when Intel opted not to work with Apple on a processor for the iPhone. Amazon wasn't selling MP3s at the time and wouldn't start until after the iPhone was released. And then only with a much smaller list of available titles compared to the iTunes store.
As for ripping CDs, when's the last time you actually bought a music CD? I haven't in a long time. Why? Because downloading is so much easier and convenient. This is one of the things the iPho
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You can purchase MP3 legally from Amazon. CD ripping (aka format shifting) has always been legal.
Oh and if your candybar phone was anything like mine, using its hobbled browser to download music from Amazon would have been pretty painful if would have worked at all.
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>>"If CEO of Intel isn't enough to put someone above the "loser" bar, then what are you?"
Your real father.
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This is likely the main reason Otellini "stepped down" a few years early. Intel CEOs typically stay at the helm for 10 years.
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The day Steve Jobs stood in front of a room and introduced the Iphone EVERYONE knew this was a game changer. "Today we're going to introduce a new iPod, a phone, and world class web device" As he repeated that line the graphics on the screen merged and the room realized the leaks about three new products were instead one new device. It was a hell of a mis-direction. It wasn't "the mother of all demos" but it was a close second.
The day Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone EVERYONE already knew that he was going to announce it. There was no misdirection involved.
But granted, three new devices all-in-one-package was a clever spin.
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I do. You should see my bathroom.
my gut (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I'd went with my gut... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, he made a perfectly rational decision based upon the data he had available. It turned out in the long run that he would have been better off if he had acted otherwise, so looking back on it he says it would be better to reject rational decision making. I find this unconvincing. In my experience, people have a fantastic way of revising their own personal histories and 'the gut' is a great tool to do so. If I made the best choice I could, given the information I had, and it turned out incorrect I can always look back on things and say that my gut told me otherwise. By this means the chief protagonist of my personal history will always be correct, always know the right thing to do, even when it turned out to be wrong.
Re:I wish I'd went with my gut... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing worse than no data, is bad data.
I'm going to assume that Intel is pretty good at projecting their cost to make a chip, and that while that estimate was wrong it was unlikely wrong by a factor of 100x, more like 10-30%. That's probably still counts as good data.
Making a guess as to the volume of a brand new device, which to quote him "no one knew what the iPhone would do" is the essence of making a decision based on bad data. Any projection there was completely made up. A straw man for Apple to negotiate pricing. Treating that as some sort of number that could be plugged into a spreadsheet and used to make a decision is tantamount to incompetence at his level.
The iPhone created a new market. With even a minimal amount of information (which they had to have to do a chip cost estimate, I believe) they could have realized that. Business school 101 talks about the first mover advantage, and how locking up a market early on is often one of the make or break elements. They should have had a serious discussion about how much money they were willing to risk losing with Apple just to be the ones that walked into this new market with Apple hand in hand. By having a head start on designing chips with the right qualities they stood a good chance of selling them to other companies who wanted to get into the competitor-to-iPhone market and needed similar capabilities.
There is an aspect of hindsight being 20/20 here, but the big wins in business all come from a calculated risk. Apple's original projections for the iPod were blown away as they dominated the portable music player market. There was good reason to think the phone would be the same. Intel had a strong balance sheet at the time, and could have risked a loss if it flopped for the chance of being the go-to chip guy for an entire class of new cellular telephones.
This was someone with an engineering background, who trusted questionable numbers over rational risk taking business decisions. That's extremely not good for someone in his position.
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This was someone with an engineering background, who trusted questionable numbers over rational risk taking business decisions. That's extremely not good for someone in his position.
Otellini is not an engineer.
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Otellini is not an engineer.
While his degree is not in engineering, quoting his Wikipedia page:
Otellini joined Intel in 1974. From 1998 to 2002, he was executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, responsible for the company's microprocessor and chipset businesses and strategies for desktop, mobile and enterprise computing.
I'm pretty sure he knows more about microprocessor engineering than many fresh college graduates. His business bacgroung is all about making engineering driven decisions, which was
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So, he made a perfectly rational decision based upon the data he had available. It turned out in the long run that he would have been better off if he had acted otherwise, so looking back on it he says it would be better to reject rational decision making. I find this unconvincing. In my experience, people have a fantastic way of revising their own personal histories and 'the gut' is a great tool to do so. If I made the best choice I could, given the information I had, and it turned out incorrect I can always look back on things and say that my gut told me otherwise. By this means the chief protagonist of my personal history will always be correct, always know the right thing to do, even when it turned out to be wrong.
I agree that hindsight is 20/20. However, he may have actually had an inclination that he decided to ignore and instead make a decision "based on the data he had available"
The problem is that we sometimes look at all the relevant reports, trend studies, and specs we've been presented with and figure that constitutes the data that's available. It's not. I believe that what we often call "gut instinct" or "intuition" is really our mind's way of combining various bits of information from throughout our life
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I agree that hindsight is 20/20.
Unfortunately, that's often not true. Some people are still blind in hindsight.
However, he may have actually had an inclination that he decided to ignore and instead make a decision "based on the data he had available"
The problem is that we sometimes look at all the relevant reports, trend studies, and specs we've been presented with and figure that constitutes the data that's available. It's not. I believe that what we often call "gut instinct" or "intuition" is really our mind's way of combining various bits of information from throughout our lifetime and merging it with our sense of the current situation to form an opinion. THAT is data too.
Many techie people seem to be confounded by Apple's success because the just look and the hardware specs and think there's better stuff available. Lot's of folks in the tech industry thought the iPad was going to be a huge flop.
They seem to have a hard time grasping that numbers aren't all that matter and more data needs to be considered. The game changers are often the people who know how to look beyond the numbers.
Well said. Those who look only at the available data will always miss the next trend, because the data isn't yet available. Sometimes, you have to take the risk and trust you intuition/gut.
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They seem to have a hard time grasping that numbers aren't all that matter and more data needs to be considered. The game changers are often the people who know how to look beyond the numbers.
This is especially true for Apple. Apple's sales have always relied as much on consumers' emotional responses to its products as to the tech specs - - (Apple haters would say they relied it more or exclusively). It's always been about creating "an experience" for consumers, which, by definition, creates an emotional appeal that can't be measured quantitatively. So anyone who tries to judge the likely success or failure of a new Apple product based solely on numbers and tech specs just doesn't understand the way Apple does business at all.
I'd take it further than that. To like something because it's easier to use than another product isn't just an emotional response, it's a very practical one. The iTunes store made it easy to get the music you wanted. There were smartphones before the iPhone and even ones with touch screens. There were PDAs, There were mp3 players. There were cameras. Apple created a device that from a sheer hardware and software standpoint was perhaps not the best of breed in any of those categories but was by far and away
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The real question is (Score:2)
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intel owned an ARM chip maker at the time and they still have an ARM architecture license
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or because they insisted on making it an x86, due to IP pride and such,
which conflicted with Apple's vision.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect (without RTFAing of course) that the CPU in question would not have been x86, but an ARM chip -- Intel used to make them under the StrongARM and later Xscale brands, but sold that line to Marvell; it's conceivable they could have returned.
Intel is king of fab, they keep a half-step to a whole-step of process size ahead of the leading ARM SoC makers, so if they went with their process and ARM IP, they'd be insanely dominating, instead of just competing as now (because the x86's disadvantage almost
Re: (Score:2)
Remember that intel had and still has an arm licence, and when they did make their own arm processors the xscale had one of the best power to performance ratios available, while also having very effective frequency scaling and power management..
Even if it was an Apple designed SoC the quality of Intel's foundries are unmatched really, so for the same chip they would have received a higher quality product.
It's my opinion that, yes it would have been better.
What is the Mobile W? (Score:2)
Is that some new Windows phone?
how much money is samsung making? (Score:2)
foundry is not a high margin business. apple seems to be making all the money on the iphone. how much money would intel have made selling $20 chips?
you could argue they could have controlled the entire mobile chip market by now, but that is a stretch
Re:how much money is samsung making? (Score:4, Insightful)
Could win the mobile war? (Score:2)
iPhone - Not Intel Inside
Android - Not Intel Inside
Windows Phone - Not Intel Inside
Blackberry - Not Intel Inside
Tablets - Not Intel Inside
Game Consoles - Not Intel Inside
TV - Not Intel Inside
Microwave - Not Intel Inside
Lagging Ultrabook sales - Intel Inside
Lagging Desktop sales - Intel Inside
Did someone redefine the world Win?
Re: (Score:3)
Did someone redefine the world Win?
First they ignore your desktops, then they laugh at your mobiles, then they fight your on chip DRM, then you win.
Re: (Score:1)
Windows Phone - Not Intel Inside
Blackberry - Not Intel Inside
Did someone redefine the world Win?
I did not know it was possible to use the words "Windows Phone" or Blackberry and the word "win" the same sentence.
I've been checking dictionaries, English textbooks and left a message with a professor to get back to me.
Re: (Score:1)
Intel will not "win" this war (Score:3)
For Intel to "win" the "mobile war" as the headline suggests, Intel would have to get the mobile device market to adopt proprietary Intel parts that only Intel can sell. Otherwise, Intel is just another vendor, and the mobile device makers can buy from Intel or not at their whim; Intel just being one of a group of commodity providers is not what Intel considers a "win".
I've said it before: Apple will never lock themselves in with Intel. [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple can switch to AMD, or apple controls the software, and the base OS is fairly cross platform, while the upper levels don't use much of platform specific optimizations.
take a look at windows RT/ Windows 8 and compare it to Apple moving from PowerPC to Intel.
Re: (Score:2)
This is right - while it took Apple ages to introduce OS-X in the first place from NEXTSTEP, NEXTSTEP itself was somewhat quickly ported to SPARC and PA-RISC, while OS-X was parallelly developed on PPC & x86. It would be interesting to see how long it takes to port Mountain Lion to the A6 or A7.
But yeah, the base OS is pretty portable, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
PPC was an architecture that Apple co-owned w/ IBM & Motorola/Freescale. Yeah, IBM & Motorola weren't delivering the power saving features for them, but it was an architecture to which Apple had the rights, and could have partnered w/ any of the third party PPC manufacturers. For instance, PA Semi, which Apple acquired, was making PPC microprocessors, not ARMs. Apple, after acquiring that company, had them make an ARM based line - the A series.
At any rate, Apple could have gone to ARM even the
Re: (Score:1)
They acquired more than PA Semi. Exponential Technology at one time had the leading edge PPC implementation and they were eventually bought by Apple.
Re: (Score:2)
intel makes other families outside of the x86 ( like the strongarm) you dumb fuck
Re: (Score:1)
Actually Intel probably earns more from laptops than desktops for a couple of years now. Otellini came to power after he headed the division which designed the Pentium M so he was behind that transition. Their issue was they were blindsided by the smartphone and tablet segments. I still remember Intel claiming the next big thing was going to be smart TVs. There the energy requirements were not as cumbersome. So they sold off XScale.
AMD would probably be dead by now if not for two things: Dirk Meyer as a CEO