Andy Grove and the iPhone SE
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This was an interesting time for embedded microprocessors. I was a big fan of DEC/Intel StrongARM and XScale, and the team I worked with preferred using them in designs.
I disagree that it was simply an economic choice, and I think anyone who worked in the ARM embedded industry around that time would also disagree. The move to sell off XScale was after years of neglect. The most obvious defects were the PXA250, which could only cache write-thru due to a bug (Wikipedia does not mention this), and the lack of USB2.0 high speed, despite it being a key feature of every competing SoC.
It was obvious to everyone in my industry that ARM was going to take off in a big way, and exponentially -- "microcontrollers" had grown up, and reasonable compute power could be put everywhere at home, and even carried around with you.
Intel, on the other hand, was seen by everyone I knew, to be more concerned with cannibalization of its low-end x86 market. Stealey and Atom were coming down the pipeline (Silicon Valley secrecy wasn't what it is today), and Intel was looking to make a play in the market. Except, Intel's designs were off the mark by orders of magnitude in power consumption, and could never fill that niche. Still, the word in the street was Intel had bad internal politics at play, and its ARM offerings had to go.
So yes, it's a great shame Intel missed that incredible opportunity at a pivotal moment. But no, it was not an economic decision.
ARM meanwhile dominates the lowest end, but no one really makes money out of it. I think Intel was wise to avoid.
10/20 years later, ARM represents the vast majority of both volume and profit in home personal computing. x86 is only "winning" if you define a very small category to compare against ARM.
> ARM meanwhile dominates the lowest end, but no one really makes money out of it. I think Intel was wise to avoid.
Edit: Meanwhile the "PC" category became largely irrelevant. That's what Intel missed.
That's a ridiculous claim. 2015 shipments of 288.7 million units (Gartner) may be down but they're still huge: that's 791,000 per day. And sales of Windows tablets and 2-in-1s are growing very rapidly.
Are tablet sales "largely irrelevant" because they're lower than PC sales (206.8 million, says IDC), and even if you include tablet PCs running Windows, declining even faster? https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40990116
That's the market Intel missed.
PC sales, even as narrowly defined by IDC, are now a small minority of total personal computing volume and profit. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone
Regardless of people buying smartphones and owning multiple devices, PCs are still selling well. In fact, they are selling in greater volumes than in most previous years.
Smartphones also benefit from their high junkability factor. A decent PC now has a useful life of around 5 years, so sales should be half what they were when the average life was 2.5 years.
Smartphone sales will also halve when they last 3 years instead of 18 months.
> PC sales, even as narrowly defined by IDC
IDC's PC numbers are artificially depressed because it doesn't include tablets and 2-in-1s. So when Microsoft sells a Surface Pro 3, IDC doesn't count that as a PC.
I agree. Anyone watching the PDA/smartphone market at the time could see that something big would come behind the corner and shake things up. Yes that was the time of the HP iPAQ and Dell Axim, but also dozens of HTC made phones under different brands and tens of millions Nokia smartphones, all powered by TI's OMAP and not Intel.
The original iPhone sold around 6 million units, at the time Nokia S60/S80 devices, Blackberries, UIQ and any other smartphones driven by ARM CPUs had sales of over 100 million.
So yes, Intel just missed a chance and didn't care.
I was astonished to see how far reaching the Marvel Empire has become (I do like their comics and tv shows and movies :-)), but it's MarvelL.
The real threats for Apple, imho, are successful web companies expanding towards hardware. Apple does great HW and poor online services; someone doing great online services and great HW could hit them badly. Google got close already; Microsoft will try again once they complete their retooling; Amazon are unfocused but could fish a winner with some original thinking; Facebook/Dropbox/others might also challenge at some point. Luckily for Apple, hardware is very difficult to get right and get profitable.
I'd rather follow a set of virtual arrows to my destination than have to keep checking my phone. This goes for a lot of tasks I use my phone for. Though the privacy concerns are more worrisome than mobile phones!
VR isn't going to be a novelty if people switch to experiencing life primarily in a virtual manner due to the vast expanse it will offer. That includes travel, art, gaming, social, shopping, media.
With today's technology? No. With the technology we'll have in 30 years? Yep. And particularly the technology that will gradually evolve over that time. It'll be far more impressive and useful than the smartphones we have today, in every regard.
If you had told someone in 2003 that billions of people would use their cell phones for so much today, and that people would practically be attached at the hip 24/7 to them, I don't think you'd have been believed - the notion that everyone would have their face buried in large glass screens for hours each day, socializing, shopping, etc.
I don't think Apple has ever been as clear on a new product segment.
If Apple gets so far behind that they need to offer it to their customers, they will probably make it easier to integrate Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook's offerings.
I thought the consensus was that Steve Jobs was "greatest CEO in tech history". Make up your mind Silicon Valley!
The SE will sell massive volumes in India if the pricing matches the one in US - but at the current point its very uncertain looking at Indian consumer landscape.