How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
thechipletter.substack.com
thechipletter.substack.com
I don't like how this whole article is framed as how obvious it was that Intel made a huge mistake. Hindsight is 20/20, there was no such data available.
It was not predictable that the iPhone would be a success, especially not to a degree of Intel sacrificing every profit calculation in mere "hope" of huge volume later.
The numbers were there for the iPod. Intel could have just pitched to become the SoC-supplier for the iPod and didn't do it. They surely crunched the numbers several times and it didn't work out.
The first iPhone was then built on the iPod platform with an Infineon modem, so the better question to ask is probably: Why wasn't Intel interested to supply the CPU for the iPod?
Possibly because Otellini framed it as such?
The latter part of the article answers your other points.
Apple demanding a (probably much) lower price-point to have the SoC applied in a mysterious unknown project without a volume-commitment could as well have destroyed the business and profit-margin for the entire Xscale business for Intel and its other customers...
One of the key premises of the article is that Apple likely didn't know it was bidding for the iPhone and the decision was taken on that basis.
Why is why saying 'Intel turned down the iPhone' is problematic.
Apple demanding a (probably much) lower price-point to have the SoC applied in a mysterious unknown project without a volume-commitment could as well have destroyed the business and profit-margin for the entire Xscale business for Intel and its other customers...
Intel often cuts prices to favored customers to win business, for example they did so for the original Xbox CPU, to prevent an AMD from being used.
In 2006, Intel has just won back Palm from TI and were under incredible pressure from Qualcomm who had their MSM7200 SoC in the pipeline (which integrated both CPU and Modem in a single low-power package).
> Intel often cuts prices to favored customers to win business, for example they did so for the original Xbox CPU, to prevent an AMD from being used.
There's "cutting prices" and then there's selling BELOW COST, without a volume-commitment from the customer for long-term break-even...
Otellini himself later claimed that they miscalculated the cost regardless of volume.
Problem is that they had already decided to get rid of XScale due to "reasons" by that point.
That's also a reason why the iPhone was not designed around a more power-efficient SoC which combined the CPU and the cellular Modem into one package: The Modem was the add-on to the architecture which turned the iPod Touch into that exclusive Phone they built for AT&T.
I mean, that's true only in the same way as your phone uses a newer generation of the CPU in your washing machine (these days, both are likely to contain ARM cores of some sort). They were both ARM SoCs made by Samsung, but the relationship kind of ends there; totally different ARM core, totally different peripherals, totally different everything.
They literally utilized their existing iPod supply chain to build the core BOM of the product.
So yes, hindsight is 20/20, but as CEO of intel, he failed miserably from not putting more effort into the decision making.
iPhone was predictably huge, but I don’t think it was a sure thing it would be this huge. And Intel’s finance-driven culture probably did the math and decided it was better to pass because of the uncertainty. Finance hates uncertainty.
At that time, it could as well have been Apple's attempt to a build an Apple TV (which never materialized), a Set-Top-Box (which was reworked for years to then end up as a iPhone-in-a-box AppleTV), a Premium Wi-Fi network, a game console,...
This is what monopolies do, it breeds laziness in the good days, and as a company backslides on the morass of apathetic incompetent mbas that settled into their middle management Machiavelli fiefdoms, it becomes a clinging game to make retirement before layoff
https://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=1362
With that in mind, you can see how someone might look at it and say "ok Apple isn't that serious about phones"
But I'd bet what actually happened was Steve Jobs used one and said "this thing sucks, throw more money at our iPhone project"
At the time of discussion with Intel, it was not an explicit phone project, it was _A_ Apple project. Over the years, Apple spent millions on projects to disrupt some markets which either didn't materialize at all or ended up not disruptive/competitive in the market.
There are countless examples of this. Some Moonshot where Apple thought they knew better what the market want to just figure out that it doesn't work.
The project Steve Jobs was talking about could as well have been one of THOSE projects, and Apple tried to get a established and well-working component at a price which would potentially destroy Intels business with its other customers.
> but as CEO of intel, he failed miserably from not putting more effort into the decision making.
But who said that he didn't put effort in the decision making? According to Otellini himself Apple was demanding a price lower than Intel's COST.
At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it.
Feature phones were already outpacing PC growth by then and Intel decided to snub the market. Canceling XScale was a truly stupid decision.
There's still phones made these days with physical keyboards if you truly value the feature.
Intel tried to corner that market by deviating from ARM with their custom MMX architecture. It worked with Windows PocketPC as a OS-supplier, but HW-vendors with their own OS didn't want to limit their supply-chain to a single CPU-platform.
But yes, their belief in x86 being superior surely clouded their judgement on XScale's future potential
> "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."
It's not even sacrificing profit; it's actively reducing profits by selling at a loss.
Also, after the magnitude of their error to get in at the ground floor sank in, Intel had no problems with selling x86 chips at a loss trying to break into mobile devices.
Remember their contra-revenue strategy?
Intel is a big reason things are so great, but also so crap, in computing.
Try to remember, the computing revolution didn't start in the 21st century. It's just got incredibly insane, in the 30 years of personal computing.
>Why wasn't Intel interested to supply the CPU for the iPod?
Because Intel and Apple had beef, long-since, already. The iPod was just another mp3 device, until - suddenly - it wasn't.
The writing on the wall for personal computing has been there for all of the computing pioneer companies .. the fact that Intel and Apple didn't get connected, is as much about the fact that these people were really in competition with each other from the beginning.
Apple was always going to own its own fabrication capabilities. From the outside of the box, all the way in.
Intel wanted all the other boxes, not just Apples, too ..
Apple still does not own its own fabrication capabilities. I assume you mean design capabilities.
It's anyway a big claim that Apple was always somehow competing with everyone in the market. That's the company which rebranded HP Laser Printers, made an HP-branded iPod, made an iTunes phone with Motorola, just moved from IBM PowerPC to Intel for their PCs (!), decided for a while to not make a 5K display but let LG build an official one instead, pushed LaCie as an external HDD partner, etc.
Apple always had ambitions to "wow" with its customized thoughtful products, but before the "iPhone money" they barely ever had enough order-volume to dominate a supplier...
I'm not sure that was a foregone conclusion back in 2005-2007. If anything Apple was forced to design their own chips because nobody else was able to offer what they wanted. M-series is a thing because Intel couldn't build the low-power/higher-performance CPUs that Apple wanted.
Given Intel's fat margins at the time, it seems like a more likely explanation is that it wouldn't meet their margin expectations and that they wanted to keep showing their investors the great results they'd been used to in the desktop/server/laptop markets that Intel was truly dominating at the time.
Also, when you're a company, you have limitations on how much you can do. You can hire more people and build more fabs, but it can be hard to grow your capacity. Even looking at TSMC, Apple has been using all of their 3nm capacity for the past year. If Intel was thinking about where to allocate its scarce resources (whether that be engineers, fab capacity, etc.), it might make more sense to concentrate on the areas where you're going to have a significant advantage and higher margins - unless you really know that Apple is coming out with something world-changing, which you wouldn't know in advance. Intel was still making enormous gains in the x86 market at this time and giving users big reasons to keep upgrading their machines. 2008-2010 Intel doubled their performance. The point is that there was certainly an opportunity cost to betting on Apple's new mystery device where they wanted a low-margin chip and at the time Intel's x86 business was booming.
I think there can be other issues as well. Why didn't Intel become the iPod SoC? Maybe Intel didn't have such a low-spec'd part for that purpose. The XScale processors were higher spec'd and Apple certainly didn't need that kind of speed for an iPod. Even with the iPhone, the article notes that the Cortex A8 designs were closing the gap with Intel's XScale, but the iPhone didn't use a Cortex A8 until the iPhone 3GS in 2010 (the original and 3G used older ARM designs). So part of the issue might have been that Intel's XScale processors were powerful beyond what Apple wanted to pay for at the time and it would have cost Intel money to make what Apple wanted (a low spec processor) while others already had that available.
I think it's also hard to say that this decision meant that Intel lost out on the iPhone. Realistically, if Apple was going with an ARM architecture, Intel would have lost the iPhone in a few generations anyway. It's not like Samsung got to keep Apple's iPhone CPU business. Maybe Intel could have kept Apple's business with heavy investment in XScale, but Apple bought PA Semi in April 2008 (less than a year after the original iPhone launch). So it seems like Apple was looking to build their own processors even before the iPhone became huge (the original iPhone only sold around 7M units while iPods were selling around 50M/year at the same time). Even if Apple had chosen XScale, Intel probably would have lost the iPhone business.
And Intel probably wouldn't have made up for it on the Android side. Qualcomm's control of CDMA (important for the US) and subsequent domination of high-end modems was used to reinforce their CPU business. Maybe Intel could have overcome that, but we've seen that modems are a hard business - Intel failed in its modem business and while Apple has seen huge success in their CPU business, they haven't had the same success in modems. To put it in perspective, Apple bought PA Semi with 150 employees in 2008 and 4.5 years later had new custom Swift cores in their A6 CPUs. Apple bought Intel's modem business with 2,200 employees in 2019 and 5 years later they'll be introducing the iPhone 16 still on Qualcomm modems.
So did Intel truly miss out on the iPhone? Maybe somewhat. However, it kinda sounds like Intel's XScale business was too high-end and even if Apple had selected XScale, they were still going to be making their own CPUs given that Apple could license the ARM architecture (unlike x86). There certainly was some space for Intel, but it would have been a difficult fight even if Intel were committed to it. Qualcomm's strategy of tying together its patents, CPUs, and modems to reinforce each other is hard to overcome.
In hindsight, sure: the mobile market would have been worth fighting for. But it seems like it would have been a tough market to crack into given what Intel had (a processor too high-spec'd for what the market wanted at the time) and the fact that vendors could easily switch away from Intel to any number of other ARM manufacturers, including ARM's reference cores. If Intel had bet big on mobile, they probably could have made it a good business for them, but it would have been a big gamble for a market without good barriers to entry and where competitors like Qualcomm might have their own barriers.
This is almost certainly true once they decided that iOS was going to be based on MacOS. Those software design choices had to have been based on a very aggressive hardware roadmap
This isnt right, Intel's Lunar Lake is built partially on TSMC N3B. It launches in a few days.
So but possibly only because they had no alternatives. After all building your own chips is a huge long-term investment with all of risk. Intel fully committing to XSCale would probably have significantly altered that calculation.
> license the ARM architecture (unlike x86).
They still had to design their own cores which isn't cheap or straightforward. Something even Qualcomm struggled a lot with (and ended up failing at).
> The first iPhone was then built on the iPod platform
Eh? No it wasn't. The iPod that existed when the iPhone came out was an 80MHz ARM7. The Touch (a 400MHz ARM11) came out a few months after the iPhone, and was essentially an iPhone with the cellular equipment stripped out.
> Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple's Mac business, he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple's paradigm-shifting product.
"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we'd done it...
At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it...
And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
I just don't buy it. If Intel realized in hindsight that they could price out a competitive chip, why didn't they sell it to Android manufacturers? So much effort goes into making us lament a world where Intel iPhones existed, but I don't even see the appeal. Intel didn't have a vested interest in ARM (an attitude persisting to this day), they weren't going to acquiesce to Apple's desired margins then or now, and Apple would always have the logical opportunity to cut out their chip middleman. It's about as appealing as a shit sundae sat on a trap door.
> That mistake led to a huge missed opportunity.
Again, was it really that huge? After licensing cost to ARM, core design fees and the bulk deals worked out, I can't see Apple allowing Intel room to breathe. From a certain perspective, it almost seems like Intel never had any desire to genuflect for Apple and only signed the Mac deals to proliferate their existing design catalog. I can't say for sure what the financials worked out to be, but considering Mac market share at the time it makes sense why Intel wasn't super motivated. If we could look at a modern iPhone bill-of-materials, I don't think either of us would feel bad for Intel.
Apple probably ends up getting chips only slightly above cost from TSMC. (It pays $18 B a year, which is pretty low for the CPUs in roughly 400 million phones, watches, tablets, Macs, AppleTV, etc. it sells every year) but it also pays well in advance the costs for building the fabs for those chips. This gave TSMC the scale needed to be the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer, which means it simultaneously has lower costs from economies of scale, as well as more pricing power, from being able to offer leading edge nodes first.
It's not like the Core products that went into Macs - making iPhone chips is a bespoke, ground-up production. It barely makes sense for Apple to insist on using Intel fabs unless they're heavily insecure about outsourcing their supply chain. It makes absolutely no sense at all for Intel to design ARM chips when they don't own an architecture license and would ostensibly only purchase one to make Apple happy. Again, I feel like this entire "lament" is manufactured by Apple fans eager to rewrite history with Apple making generous offers to domestic American businesses. In reality, Apple's endless desire for hardware margins drove them to dictator-states and third-world manufacturing hubs to meet their quota. It's okay for us to pragmatically admit Apple never had any business with Intel, and Intel was right not to convince them otherwise.
> ARM chips when they don't own an architecture license and would ostensibly only purchase one to make Apple happy
They did certainly own one. XScale was a custom core and not licensed from ARM. IIRC pretty much all high-end PDAs used them so it would have been the default/safe choice for Apple had Intel decided not to abandon it.
Is there any information about those terms? Could they really have been worse than whatever deal with Apple has with ARM these days?
The main downside with ARM/XScale is that Intel would be forced to compete with all other manufacturers and wouldn't have been able to charge their monopolistic/oligopolistic margins on their products. Of course Intel being Intel they could have just added enough proprietary extensions to solve that.
> Apple's endless desire for hardware margins drove them to dictator-states and third-world manufacturing hubs to meet their quota
Sure. But Apple wasn't really in a position to do that back in 2005-2007. It took years for them to build that because they could do it iteratively, I doubt Intel would have allowed them as much freedom as Samsung though.
Intel later attempted to bring x86 SoCs to (Android) smartphones (for example the ASUS ZenFone 2 was x86-based), but at that time Arm processors were already quite established in the Android ecosystem, so this attempt was a commercial failure.
See for example https://www.xda-developers.com/what-happened-x86-phones/ for details.
We can argue for or against Intel acquiring an ARM license in an alternate reality, but truth is they don't care. Apple wanted to turn them into something that would never work, and even if they got what they wanted, Apple's current supply-chain squeeze would have obviated any chance of Intel sticking around.
They had an ARM license and they had their own high-end cores that pretty much all PDAs used. In the early 2000s if you wanted a high-end ARM chip Intel was the default choice.
> We can argue for or against Intel acquiring an ARM license in an alternate reality, but truth is they don't care
Well as I said they already had one in our reality and could have easily ended up in the position Qualcomm is now if they played their cards right (well realistically in a better position because Qualcomm historically struggled keeping up with their own core designs and ended up switching to Cortex while Intel had a significant head start).
Except TSMC? It is not like Intel wont have its margin in making a chip for Apple. It will just be much smaller margin, or margins of modern day Fabless Soc Design company. The problem is Intel misjudged the volume, which ultimately meant they also miscalculated the whole OPex and Capex equation. And Intel dont want to do low margin business ( by their standards ).
Most of your statement suggest Intel would have to make a loss in working in Apple. And yet TSMC has been enjoying their ride purely because of Apple.
Intel's margins made sense when they were selling pre-designed x86 CPUs for use in Macs. It expressly does not make sense when a company notorious for loving low margins asks you to design and manufacture a chip you won't be legally allowed to use anywhere else. Again - Intel was absolutely correct to recognize Apple's attempt to cuck them here.
Intel already had an ARM license they had used to create their XScale line.
They decided to sell that line of business off to Broadcom instead of fabbing a chip for Apple.
Later they decided their failure to enter the mobile device market was a big enough error that they burned through about a billion dollars in a failed attempt to push x86 as a viable alternative to ARM for mobile devices.
> Intel was absolutely correct to recognize Apple's attempt to cuck them here.
I see it the other way around. Unless Intel somehow severely fucked it up (not a distinct possibility, just Intel being Intel) Apple would probably be stuck with their chips both on mobile and laptop/desktop to this day.
They just screwed up the cost to manufacture estimate which led them to make a bad call.
That's straight out of their CEO's mouth in an interview, so there isn't anything to "debunk".
Later, they would attempt to correct the error by selling x86 chips way below cost in a failed effort to break into the mobile device market.
> In order to make these platforms viable for the low-end and mid-range of the tablet market, Intel provided system vendors with "contra-revenue" subsidies. These platforms simply required an expensive set of surrounding components to work, so Intel "made up the difference," so to speak, to customers who used its platforms with subsidies.
This program likely cost Intel, and its stockholders, in excess of a billion dollars.
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-corp...
Just adding some historical notes, Portalplayer's IC was used in the iPod until 2006ish ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PortalPlayer ), the first iphone used a Samsung ARM chip (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) ) , and fabless design companies like P.A. Semi and Intrinsity were acquired by Apple in 2008 and 2010, respectively.
As the tale went, he was sent out to this doomed-from-birth spinoff as a "sunset cruise" to basically force him into retirement (for this bad decision) without the bad publicity of a public head-chopping.
There was no money in mobile SoCs, and there still isn’t. Apple makes their own chips anyway!
Intel was right to focus on the x86.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9708/analyzing-apple-statemen...
I suspect if anyone else could keep up with TSMC Apple would still dual source.
But between their lead and the benefits of being such a big customer they get first crack at the cutting edge stuff, single sourcing manufacturing probably makes the most sense.
And their interests are aligned, unlike their dependencies on MS/Adobe/Motorola/IBM/Intel.
In any other context, that might be splitting hairs but it’s a meaningful distinction in this conversation.
Even though I sent my prints out to be printed by shapeways or whatever, I still tell people "I made" those parts.
Intel didn't just miss out on business as a fab, Apple would have used their chip design as well.
Which leads you to wonder if Apple still would have begun designing chips themselves, if Intel had put some real effort into designing mobile chips.
I think it's safe to say that they had already selected an off the shelf Samsung CPU before they did the public demo of the device.
Apple can only do that now, because of the billions they have made on the iPhone, plain and simple.
And - more importantly - they were well geared to do that, since the beginning of computing.
There being no money in SoC's, is because they're all being made across the other side of the planet, mostly, from the intended final users.
If Intel were really 'leading edge', they'd have made desk-side custom fabrication a thing in the makerspace already. Such that I can, as a computer user, print 10 or 20 or X little chips, for my own specific purposes, non-mass-market.
This would be a truly revolutionary adventure from a 'grandfather of computing' style company.
Alas, the x86 is, indeed, everywhere. Grandfather Intel has a massive garden.
If only the SoC battles were truly localized, and a real computing revolution can happen (before its too late).
You should have a locally-built device in your hand.
Qualcomm market cap: $193 billion
TSMC market cap: $888 billion
Seems designing and fabbing SoCs is plenty valuable
Taiwan Semi's market cap is $888 billion. They're - remarkably - now worth 10x what Intel is.
Intel could have moved big volumes during that period. At the very least they could have been a fab.
They also largely switched to their own chips because vendors weren’t meeting their needs.
Again, Intel could have staved it off on both computers and phones if they didn’t mess up so badly on delivery over the last several years.
The first iPhone was also gigantic, hideous, couldn't send pictures - something even a cheap $20 Samsung from the carrier could do - and it also didn't sell very well. People were more into "The Google phone", the Sidekiq, or the latest Razr. Think it wasn't til the 3GS came out with a ton of marketing push that it started to gain popularity, and it ended up having more to do with the App Store than the hardware - people did not like those touch screens for the first several years of smartphones. They came out at the height of texting and ringtone era, and we were pretty set in our ways, and it took years to change that behavior.
I think the App Store resonated a lot more with people back then rather than the iPhone as a device. MySpace was still around, the Bush-era recession had everyone looking for a side hustle. Most young/ambitious people I was around in "tech" (which was effectively HTML-based SEO and WordPress design) had a Blackberry and a side business. This kid I worked with became "rich" from an iPhone app that just combined other iPhone apps haha. Loved that time period. Graffitio!
Would have been very hard to predict the success of the iPhone, even as I was already entering orders for customers on a fully touch screen Aloha point-of-sale long before iPhone.
It definitely didn't get mainstream popularity until the 3GS/4 and the App Store, but people were definitely interested from day 1. Don't forget that early builds of Android looked much more like a Blackberry clone until the iPhone was announced, and then Google immediately scrapped everything and rewrote it from the ground up to be iPhone-like.
The iPhone is that. I used to deride it at launch when I had my Sony P1, but it was truly a revolution. Anyone denying its success looking back,even as a v1, is living in a bubble.
Touch is probably the single most intuitive and easy to use interface ever created for computing. It is so obvious even a 5 year old child understands it without being taught (as both my kids did). Very very very few people found touch to be a significant learning curve at all so I'm not sure where that idea comes from.
There was definitely a whisper campaign from the tech talking heads that people wanted keyboards and touch screens were not the future... but that was mostly from people who never used it or competitors who had nothing to compete with.
> The first iPhone was also gigantic, hideous, couldn't send pictures - something even a cheap $20 Samsung from the carrier could do
It wasn't much larger than competing "smart" phones at the same and the large size was in fact a huge selling point: a bigger screen to see more content in apps and on websites.
MMS support was missing for sure but was also rolled out as a software update to all existing customers for free. The first time AFAIK that ever happened in the cell phone game. Prior to that (and still in Android land) updates require carrier cooperation and manufacturers did not hand out free features - buy a new phone for that.
> and it also didn't sell very well. People were more into "The Google phone", the Sidekiq, or the latest Razr.
I would say it sold quite well and exceeded expectations. In the iPhone announcement Apple said they'd like to sell 10 million of them by 2008 and sold 13 million. Sales roughly doubled the next year (2009). And the next (2010). And the next (2011). And the next (2012).
> I think the App Store resonated a lot more with people back then rather than the iPhone as a device.
I don't agree it resonated more than the device at that time but it was certainly an extremely important milestone. Apps, especially games, definitely drove a lot of adoption.
Yeah that's all I was saying. I've used iPhone exclusively for 15 years and am not anti-Apple, but people cannot handle nuance in online forums, so they they come out swinging if you share any experience that doesn't 1:1 reflect the brand marketing of the company.
The razr2 sold 5M units and the sidekick sold 3M to iPhone 1’s 6.1M.
The n95 did outsell the iPhone with 10M units but Nokia had a massively more mature sales pipeline whereas Apple had to build out carrier relations. It also shipped before the iPhone was even announced which gave it time to accumulate sales.
Everyone in the space though recognized how big it was because carriers were going out of their way to try to get it on their network (since at the time Apple was doing 1 carrier per country). Apple got lucky that AT&T bought Singular which made the iPhone accessible to many many more people.
3GS’s 37 million units was because Apple had 2 years to build up manufacturing capacity and carrier sales channels to match demand for what had become clearly a smartphone revolution.
This worry removed, and the fact you actually had a real browser that could open real websites were the two main features that to me seemed like a huge leap forward.
Nokia and Blackberry were selling a lot more than both brands at the time. Blackberry alone had 20%+ market share when the Pearl was released. Nokia sold the most phones by far.
Apple sold over 6M units of the first iPhone unless you’re saying 1.4M in the first quarter after launch since it launched in September. I was comparing it to phones released at a similar time and claiming that sidekick was somehow more successful is straight up laughable regardless of how you look at it.
The first iPhone defined what the smartphone category should be. Google took heed which saved Android. Nokia and blackberry did not and you can tell where they’re at now.
So? If anything it supports the point that iPhone wasn't an immediate success. It wasn't as successful as the Razr flip phone was before it, not for a while. The original point was just that it would have been difficult to predict the success of iPhone even after it released, because it didn't do that well at first.
> In its first week, Apple had sold 270,000 iPhones domestically.[47] Apple sold the one millionth iPhone 74 days after the release.[48] Apple reported in January 2008 that four million were sold.[49] As of Q4 2007, strong iPhone sales put Apple no. 2 in U.S. smartphone vendors, behind Research In Motion and ahead of all Windows Mobile vendors.[50]
> As of October 2007, the iPhone was the fourth best-selling handset in the U.S., trailing the Motorola RAZR V3, the LG Chocolate, and the LG VX8300.[51]
I’d say being the #2 smartphone vendor on your first model and beating all Windows Mobile would be a fantastic first step and a clear indicator it would be extremely successful in addition to being #4 across all us handsets. 4M were sold in the first 6 months. You’re just simply misremembering how big it was and how well it sold.
The 3G version the next year sold 4x as many units (25M) . You could say it’s because 3G was such a huge upgrade our other software things like mms and App Store, but the first iPhone was in 6 countries while 3G was in 22 and got to 70. The 3GS did outdo the growth of that since it shipped 5M more units than would be explained just by being available in more countries (80 vs 70).
Could you predict it would end up dominating the smartphone market even as that market ate up more of the legacy feature phone market? Maybe that’s harder but the iPhone’s success wasn’t all that hard. The lack of any competition that could really keep up was another indicator. Android was a pretty big failure for a few years until enough of the feature set became parity and table stakes that people felt comfortable using it (or because Android was available in a lower price segment Apple wasn’t competing in).
It's not like Apple was some scrappy startup going up against giants, when their profits had been in the billions for years prior to the iPhone, which by the way followed the MacBook launch in 2006.
> strong iPhone sales put Apple ... behind Research In Motion
Are you aware that RIM is Blackberry? This is what I've been saying, iPhone was behind the others like Blackberry, Razr, Nokia, etc.
> As of October 2007, the iPhone was the fourth best-selling handset in the U.S., trailing the Motorola RAZR V3, the LG Chocolate, and the LG VX8300.
Yep. 1 million is a lot, but Razr was selling 10s of millions, Blackberry and Nokia were selling more than that. But yeah I guess iPhone had the super cheap carrier phones beat, but they weren't meant to be high end products.
> The 3G version the next year sold 4x as many
Yeah that's when it started to take over. Especially when the 3GS / $99 AT&T plan came out, everyone got it by then.
Predicting hits: What about bluetooth headsets? They were forcing them on us around the same time period we're talking about now... but only a few geeky dads and cheesy business guys used them, eventually they weren't really sold anywhere, comedians had been referencing them at this point. Having lived through that era I would have never predicted the success of Airpods. As I said in my above post it wasn't like we didn't have touchscreen devices. I don't recall being as receptive to the touchscreen as you do, seemed like most people outside the Apple cult initially hated it.
First I think you may be misremembering your Apple history. The iPhone was very much Apple’s first product release post their iPod success which rescued their company. While they weren’t a failing company that they were in 2001 (like near banrukpt failing) they were not by any means a behemoth. In 2006 they made 2B in profit on 10B of revenue. By comparison Nokia made $7B in profit. Looking at MacBook belies that you seem to not realize how insignificant those sales were to Apple’s revenue (and how that’s even more true today even though they’ve actually grown their market share in that segment).
> Are you aware that RIM is Blackberry? This is what I've been saying, iPhone was behind the others like Blackberry, Razr, Nokia, etc.
Except not. Razr isn’t a smartphone and iPhone outsold any smartphones that Nokia made. By 2007 when Apple shipped the iPhone RIM had been shipping the blackberry for about 8 years and had completely taken over the enterprise segment which until Apple cracked it was considered to be the only place that smartphones would be successful and that it would perennially remain Blackberrie’s to lose. To have a competitor who’s never done cellular or smartphones before take #2 from the get go is huge considering how unlike traditional consumer electronics that Apple had engaged in until then, the sales channel and regulatory environment looked completely different. Think about it - one huge innovation they did was that you could buy the cell phone directly from them and through the Apple Store and they took care of the carrier onboarding experience. No one else attempted (or even could attempt) to do that.
You’re simply misremembering or trying to paint a weird picture that the first iPhone was this niche device no one wanted. That’s literally not true. It’s inherently impossible to enter a mature market and become #1 overnight. That Apple came in at #2 is really astounding and everyone was paying attention to it and Google literally hit pause on their launch by a year to completely redesign their OS because they saw it as the future.
> Having lived through that era I would have never predicted the success of Airpods.
Well I worked at Apple before they launched AirPods and got to see an exec demo of them. From the first instant I knew they were going to be a hit. Did I know it was going to be a multi billion dollar business by itself? If I’d done the math on it I probably could have worked it out just from estimating an attach rate. I think you shouldn’t extrapolate your inability to predict hits to others and say no one saw things coming.
As for touch screens, we actually didn’t have capacitive touch screens. All the smartphones to date had been resistive and the introduction of multitouch that capacitive enabled as well as better scan rates made a huge difference. I think you’re outing your viewpoint when you’re discounting people who were enthusiastic about the iPhone as members of a cult even now without allowing for the possibility that maybe they see something you don’t. Same kind of reasoning happened with the iPod too and I made the same mistake thinking they wouldn’t be big and it was this weird Apple thing and the UX seemed weird until they fixed their strategy to open it up to Windows users. My excuse was that I was still a teenager so I didn’t have sufficient perspective. Btw not everything Apple touches is gold immediately. I think they’re going to struggle with Vision Pro. I think they did a bunch of novel interesting UX innovations but the “killer product” hasn’t been built in that space yet and Meta is a much savvier opponent than they have ever had to face to date in a new product line.
Unless we look at the actual data (i.e. Mac revenue was always bigger and was a actually growing at very fast pace unlike iPod by the time the iPhone came out)
Revenue from Q4, 2005:
Mac: $1,611, iPod: $1,212
Q4, 2006:
Mac: $2,213, iPod: $1,559
Q4, 2007:
Mac: $3,103, iPod: $1,619, iPhone: $118
Q4, 2008:
Mac: $3,620, iPod: $1,660, iPhone: $806
Q4, 2009:
Mac: $3,952, (only MacBooks: $2,866) iPod: $1,563, iPhone: $2,297
Revenue from iPhone sales didn't surpass MacBook sales (so desktops excluded) until 2010.
(iTunes revenue was lower than Peripherals, Other Hardware, Software and Service in all of those years)
2001 (ipod initial launch at end of year): 4.1B/5.36B, 76% Mac, <1% iPod
2002: 4.3B/5.74B 74% Mac, 2.5% iPod
2003: 4.9B/6.21B 79% Mac, 20% iPod
2004 (Windows support added late 2003): 5.3B/8.28B 64% Mac, 21.7% iPod
2005: 6.2B/13.93B 38% Mac, 44.5% iPod
2006: 7.4B 38% Mac, 40% iPod
2007 (iPhone launch - should cannibalize ipod): 10.3B/24.6B 42% Mac, 33% iPod
2008: 14.2B/37.49B 38% Mac, 24% iPod
2009: 16.4B/42.91B 38% Mac, 18% iPod
2010: 17.2B/65.2B 26% Mac, 12.7% iPod
When I say it's "insignificant" I don't mean to say that Apple could have cancelled it and it wouldn't have mattered. Mac still remains a meaningful pillar of their product lineup even though it only contributes ~10% of revenues.
What you have to do is consider that Apple leadership views it as an ecosystem. Mac by itself isn't a lucrative or really important business. However, it's importance is that it makes sure that a customer in their ecosystem always has an Apple product they can buy when they need something. Importantly, if they have an iPhone they're more likely to buy a Mac and if they have a Mac they're more likely to buy an iPhone (& now Watch, AirPods etc). The refresh rates for these are also different enough that you're likely to remain stuck there by default once you get into the ecosystem because it's just an easier experience.
What I'm saying is that the strategic focus and resources was not really on Mac because Apple leadership did not see growth there by itself unless it was as an attachment to the iPod. You can see in the % numbers where iPod took over Mac as contributing a huge portion of % to their bottom line as soon as they made it generally available and that Mac sales themselves only started going up like crazy once iPod became generally available to everyone. Similarly, once the iPhone comes out we see it crazily cannibalizing iPod sales. At that point strategically the iPod barely got any attention. They didn't cancel it until 2022 because it was still bringing in significant revenue streams (+ a form factor Apple didn't have a replacement for until they got the Watch). Additionally, the overall laptop market has been shrinking even as Apple has been growing which is why their marketshare in laptops is so large even though it's comparatively such a small product for them.
So while the revenue from Mac was important from a "keep working on this" perspective & "ecosystem play", the vast majority of resources, focus, and energy were definitely thrown at iPod & then iPhone because of how much bigger the opportunity was and that even for Mac iPod and iPhone were the flywheel engines driving growth in those spaces.
If you're taking "insignificant" as the cancellation point for Mac, I think it would be that they succeed in their pitch that the Vision lineup is a Mac replacement. If they manage to succeed in that product line, Mac won't be much longer for this world.
High level: You're trying to make the case that iPhones were immediately more successful than the conventional market leaders like Razr and Blackberry when that's not the case by far - it wasn't true for several years.
When someone shows that's wrong with numbers (e.g. 130 million Razrs sold in 2 years vs iPhone's 6 million in 2 years) you say something like "yeah but they were new to the space!" But that's totally peripheral, and counter to your original claim.
You'll never convince those of us who were 18-24 years old when iPhone released what happened. You obviously don't have a clue, probably were a child or out of the country at the time because you're using ChatGPT to pull up (false) info we all know intuitively.
Other awful takes:
> Macbook sales were insignificant
False.
> Mac by itself isn't a lucrative or really important business.
Lol. Saying $10 billion a year is not lucrative is crazy. Saying that 30%+ market share on the laptop market is not important is crazy.
> Once the iPhone comes out we see it crazily cannibalizing iPod sales. At that point strategically the iPod barely got any attention.
Nobody ever compared iPhone to iPod - we were talking about feature phones of the day like Razr, Blackberry, Nokia, etc.
Most of your paragraphs are pure conjecture.
As for the ChatGPT dig, for what it’s worth I spot checked various numbers that they were consistent with other sources and Apple’s official Q4 numbers. If you can point out specific issues I’d be happy to correct. I called it out simply in case someone wanted to triple check the numbers. But again, please refrain from baseless attacks and point out actual errors in the facts presented if any.
I pointed out that Apple on initial launch was the #2 provider outselling ALL windows mobile manufacturers including Nokia. They were widely recognized as completely reinventing the smartphone market even at the time which you can tell because Google had an “oh shit” moment with Android to competent rethink the OS to build it around multitouch. I don’t know what else to tell you. This is based on reporting and direct anecdotal conversations I have had with Google and Apple coworkers that related that history to me contemporaneously.
The successful Razr version was released a year before and Motorola was a very mature cell phone company that basically introduced phones worldwide right away similar to how Apple does phones today and was not a smartphone. It’s also important to remember that was actually the first “Apple” phone since it was integrated into the iTunes experience (ie if your wanted iPod + cell phone). So if anything, a feature phone at the same price point as Apple a year prior selling like hotcakes only proves that it was clear iPhone was a big deal.
> Lol. Saying $10 billion a year is not lucrative is crazy
It is crazy but that’s less than 3% of 2023 revenue (in 2023 it’s still about 10% at 30B but down 27% from 2022).
It’s a strategic product to build the Apple ecosystem but tactically it’s not where they make their money and sales and focus is. That’s why you see them still making Apple TV’s for a fraction of Mac revenue (watch + AirPods + tv + HomePod is $9B and the majority there is going to be watch and AirPods).
Also if you actually follow the space you’d know the reason that Apple has a significant portion of the laptop market is because the market itself has stagnated and shrunk because smartphones and tablets have eaten it. In the same time period since 2007 that Mac revenue have taken to double Apple's overall revenues have 10x. I gave context from before in 2001 to show that Mac sales were stagnating and not at all a way that Apple would survive and once they knew how big iPod was they knew their future was not Mac. This by the way is straight from the horses mouth - Steve Jobs was one of presenters for interns that year.
As for the strategic hypotheses, keep saying it’s conjecture all you want but please be aware I’ve had conversations with people who were within the company including some senior leaders. So while it may be wrong I suspect my conjectures may have a slightly larger chance of being correct than someone who remembers the iPhone as some “also ran” phone that no one could predict was going to be that big and forgetting all the lines at stores even it launched and so the constant non stop press it had for years even post launch.
I’ll reiterate - if you have issues with my facts or conjecture, please actually point out specifically which facts are wrong or provide news articles or analysis contradicting what I’ve stated. Your recollection of how big a moment iPhone was in popular perception and in the tech industry is wrong or you weren’t paying proper attention or were in the wrong community that was on the periphery of everything happening.
> I’ve had conversations with people who were within the company including some senior leaders
There we go, why didn't you just say that in a disclaimer up front? At one point I cursed the Apple influencers and was mainly referring to you :D
You had a very different experience than the mainstream since you worked at Apple when it launched.
> This by the way is straight from the horses mouth - Steve Jobs was one of presenters for interns that year.
Sounds like you were doing keg stands in the Apple Koolaid while most of us were still pirating Windows Vista off LimeWire and changing discs at red lights! You haven't lived unless you had a 6-disc changer (in your trunk for some reason).
For Vista in this era it was mostly boot from USB stick because it was too big for CD and DVD was bougie
To be fair using only Q4 figures was a mistake, since iPod sales were always the highest in Q1 because of the holiday season (not as noticeable for Macs).
> ChatGPT to pull up (false) info we all know intuitively.
I summed some of those years from Apple's Quarterly reports (annoyingly they didn't seem to report by segment FY sales...) and they are more or less similar:
2006 : Mac : $7,375 (49.01%) iPod+iPhone : $7,676 (50.99%)
2007 : Mac : $10,314 (55.02%) iPod+iPhone : $8,428 (44.98%)
2008 : Mac : $14,276 (56.48%) iPod+iPhone : $10,997 (43.52%)
2009 : Mac : $13,824 (43.93%) iPod+iPhone : $17,657 (56.07%)
No argument about what happened after the iPhone (specifically 3G + App Store) came out, but I'm not sure I fully agree with:
> What I'm saying is that the strategic focus and resources was not really on Mac because Apple leadership did not see growth there by itself unless it was as an attachment to the iPod.
By 2007 iPod's market share was ~72% in the US. The MP3 player market was pretty saturated and there was very little growth left (especially with increasing competition from (feature)phones). On the other hand Apple only had < 5% of the PC market (in the US) by 2006 so there was a lot of space to grow especially in the laptop market if if they started released more competitive products (by ditching PowerPC).
If we look at iPod + iPhone revenue around those years
2007 :
Mac: $10,314 (42.94%)
iPod+iPhone : $8,428 (35.09%)
2008 :
Mac: $14,276 (43.92%)
iPod+iPhone: $10,997 (33.82%)
Mac sales were actually growing faster even if we combine iPhone and iPod sales (which probably meant that a lot of people switched to other phones/mp3 players instead of buying an iPhone at least initially)
I think that's mainly related to the the PowerPC to Intel transition. It's not clear if the iPod really had a huge impact on Mac sales since Mac's market share started growing much faster when iPod had already peaked. Then after iPhone sales started accelerating Mac sales growth rates began declining which would imply that handheld and PC segments aren't necessarily related that much.
If Apple hadn't released the iPhone, Mac probably would have done just fine on its own and iPod sales would have remained stagnant or declined significantly (e.g. worldwide they weren't doing that well compared to Sony Ericsson's phone sales in 2006-2007, who IIRC leaned heavily into MP3/media in those in those years). It was pretty obvious that phones/smartphones were the future regardless of what Apple did (the transition would have just been quite a bit slower without them).
Of course (compared to you) I really have no clue what the internal sentiment inside Apple was a at the time so I'm just commenting on the market as a whole.
As for iPod saturation, I don’t know if that’s actually true and I’m too lazy to look up the numbers as to when it happened. I’ll point out two things area important when thinking about things - you have market share and market size. You don’t have saturation until you have stopped growing. Owning a constant 70% of a market that’s growing consistently each year is not saturation - was the portable music market stagnant by 2007? Maybe. But you can’t tell that just from market share. According to ChatGPT growth started slowing down in 2008 but that’s already post Razr and iPhone when it became an obvious calculus of do I want and old tech iPod or a general purpose computer and cell phone in my pocket. Nanos and shuffles kept selling well because the cell phones didn’t have an appropriate answer for a very very long time (too much growth elsewhere to bother with that use case).
The transition to Intel was in 2006. I’m skeptical that’s a motivating reason for a lot of switchers and the numbers show more growth correlation with iPod windows support and iPhone which makes sense for the attachment theory whereas I don’t see in the numbers that making a big dent. It’s important to remember that consumers don’t make decisions on what CPU is in a machine; even technical people wouldn’t make that decision since even in the tech community today it’s framed as windows vs Linux vs Mac and not Intel vs AMD unless you are building a PC from parts (and Apple isn’t in that segment).
I’m not sure why you say iPod has peaked at the time of Windows transition which was in 2004. 2007 which is when growth had started slowing is when the iPhone kept up the growth. I agree that phones being the future was going to be obvious and the Razr was likely their first dip of a toe to estimate how big the market for an iPhone would be since they had a deal with Motorola for iTunes support.
As for Apple’s computer market share, the reason it’s so high is that the overall market is stagnant but Apple is managing to eke out growth here and there. Same as with smartphones where Apple has 30% of market share but 98% of the profit; they are much more streamlined than their competitors. Expect to see their market share grow one cell phones stagnate although the story there is more complicated since they play in a wider range of economic households whereas Mac products are (as they’ve always been) in more higher end segments (since the lower end would be dominated by chromebooks or no laptop). I see no indication of Mac growth stopping pre or post iPhone - it only started more recently which makes sense it would take so long because Apple is not immune to the reality in that space even though they’ve defied it for so long (and as for many companies COVID spiked sales since kids needed to do school remotely so the recent stagnation could just have been a temporary anomaly and reversion to pre pandemic numbers).
It’s genuinely hard to say what would have happened if Apple had not released the iPhone. Certainly Apple had stabilized as a company by 2001. But Mac sales had stagnated in the years prior to iPod and without iPhone as another engine it’s unclear what would have happened to Mac sales after that especially as the overall laptop and computer segments started collapsing (but this happened much much later after the smartphone revolution). Their music business may have helped a bit but a huge part of growth there itself was due to iPhone as well. These are reinforcing effects that are really hard to tease out. It’s likely it would have kept going since it was financially more stable but it would likely be at least a 10x smaller company.
Thank you for engaging factually and thoughtfully with the analysis.
iPod sales grew by 18% in 2006 and 17% in 2007. It was 140% 2006 and 373% in 2005. So yeah they weren't technically really stagnant just slowed down significantly. Even if we look at combined iPod and iPhone sales they grew slower than Nokia and Sony phone in the same period (Motorola had peaked in 2006). That didn't change until the 3G came out in 2008 and "high-end feature phone" market collapsed by 2009.
> It’s important to remember that consumers don’t make decisions on what CPU is in a machine
Yes but IIRC G5 had pretty awful performance per watt and Apple never put it into any laptops. They were stuck with G4 which wasn't really competitive with x86 by 2006.
> 2007 which is when growth had started slowing is when the iPhone kept up the growth.
It didn't initially though, not until mid 2008 if we compare to how fast Mac sales grew in the same period. Between 2006 and 2009 Apple's laptop sales increased by almost 3x or so. While even if we add up iPod + iPhone sales they "only" grew by 2x. Especially 2007 to 2008 was relatively pretty bad since iPod + iPhone sales only went up by 1.3x. Macbooks were the fastest growing product/segment between mid 2006 and mid 2008.
To be fair I'm mostly nitpicking at this point since I do agree with your longterm analysis more or less, but since Mac sales grew at the fastest during the period when iPod sales were relatively stagnant and iPhone sales were still relatively very low (2007 to mid 2008 before the 3G, the original iPhone wasn't a particularly good smartphone it had a large multitouch screen and that's about it..) it's not that obvious to me that iPod/iPhone sales were driving Mac sales that much.
Of course that specific period was pretty unique. Laptop market was growing very fast and Apple finally was offering devices which were incredibly competitive with other laptops at the time. It doesn't change the big picture too much (most growth was coming from iPod sales before that and iPhone/iPad afterwards)
The iPhone 2G was an interesting phone. But there were no 3rd party apps until the software update that came out at the same time as the 3G.
The 3G had (insert app here). And boy did that drive sales.
Am I remembering correctly that originally the iPhone only supported AT&T? My family all was on a shared Verizon plan at the time, and I have a vague recollection of the fact that it wasn't an option for us, but I'm not positive I remember correctly. Nowadays, the idea of a phone not being possible to purchase for a given network seems silly, but I feel like it was a thing at the time.
Yes, for the first few years. Within a year or two, the writing was on the wall and the other providers were dying to get it.
Verizon couldn’t have the iPhone, so they pushed that as their equivalent with a huge marketing campaign. Always felt to me like that single-handedly pushed Android into the public consciousness.
Like without that maybe Android would be huge, but we updated have gotten the name recognition. Or at least not so fast, and instead would have been more of an implementation detail in most people’s minds.
Sprint tried to compete with the Palm Pre which was neat but had issues. Then Verizon got the Pre and Sprint’s last shot at relevance died.
"But they were new to the space!" "It was still a good start!" is peripheral
It was prototype though. A lot of people could see the potential but the device itself was pretty bad.
I don’t know what Nokia’s reaction was. I don’t think I’ve ever heard.
As the smartphone king at the time in the US RIM is always the one people talked about.
Nah. The only reason the iphone didn't take off faster was that, for its time, it was extremely expensive.
$600 upfront plus a 24-month, $60/month contract [1]. That's $2000 back in 2007, or $3000 today.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/iphone_contract_price...
Maybe you weren't old enough, or are from another country. Everybody remembers this, it was a great idea on their part as it got everyone using iPhones.
Prices for the 2G iPhone really were that high and Apple even cut the price after a few months because it wasn't moving like expected.
You are forgetting, there was no App Store when the iPhone launched. Apple was originally against the idea of Apps. The App Store launched a year later, with the iPhone3G. Yet the iPhone was wildly popular not just from the day it launched, but from the day Apple first demoed it.
I think what caught people's attention with the iPhone is that it's one of the first phones where you could easily browse websites from your phone in a way that didn't feel like a gimmick.
Other phones had web browsers, but they only really worked on special mobile versions of websites. They were also slow and painful to use even on those mobile optimised websites.
Then iPhone came along, and Apple had someone managed to squash a full desktop web browser on it. It did a half decent job of reformatting desktop-only websites to fit on the screen. When pages didn't reformat, the new touched-based panning and pinch-to-zoom gestures allowed you to still experience them with ease.
And Apple managed to make the whole OS feel responsive, despite using the exact same hardware as their competitors.
This was not true per my memory. Literally everyone I knew in their 20s and 30s in NYC was switching to the iPhone 3G as of summer 2008. You had to wait in line to buy it for months.
Unlimited 3G + GPS + touchscreen browser was what made it explode. Broadband internet, in your pocket, with mapping capabilities. It felt like the possibilities were limitless, with new apps and functionality being discovered and released daily.
But the ability to mostly browse the web on it was amazing.
Also, if I remember correctly, you could adjust the clock speed to trade off battery life / performance.
Great devices overall. I've been tempted to pick one of these up for nostalgia purposes. Truly peak PDAs.
For some reason my strongest memory is using it in the dentists office.
My previous device had been a Sony Clie peg-tg50/u (which in some ways was great, but lacking built in WiFi… however I used to save web pages on my laptop and put them on it to read later). But that once fell out of my pocket on a lawn tractor, went through the blades, came out with some nicks but was otherwise fine.
I have fond memories of worms and an rts on that. (The stylus was both great and horrible for that ).
In memory what really was just amazing to me at the time: great fast mp3 player(better on the Sony)
The ability to play videos.
On the dell, the web browser probably wasn’t great, but in my memory I still remembering thinking it was the bees knees. My laptop at the time was a Toshiba Satellite with a pentium 4, 512mbs of ram, and a 16mb GeForce card. Which to me, was pretty darn amazing. (Except for its tendency to every 6-8 months become unable to boot suddenly, needing windows to be reinstalled from Toshibas 4(?) re install discs on an increasingly broken disc drive. This of course was partially more frustrating due to my limited computer skills at that time… which were more comfortable overclocking AMD K6-2s with jumper settings)
It could do a few fairly impressive things, like running emulators as you mentioned. But I think the problem with those was Windows Mobile or Windows CE or whatever they called it at the time. The touchscreens stunk as well.
It was just a crappy scaled-down version of Windows. It was missing the ability to run actual Windows software. It had a browser and a serviceable camera (it helped fulfill my eBay addiction at the time), but it wasn't the same as browsing on a PC.
It probably still wouldn't have been ideal, but within another 2-3 generations it would have been improved/faster and then 'good enough', just like the early iPhones.
You're right that the OS was garbage, further limiting the already limited hardware. I think I also got linux or BSD running and messed around with some WEP cracking in my neighbourhood for a bit, but then it otherwise sat in a drawer.
I was still in school and it was a stupid and expensive purchase, but it did teach me to only get new tech if it was actually useful and otherwise wait, which as served me well since, including the iphone (which the first one was barely adequate for what it promised).
I've read before that internally, OSX always had a working x86 port, to ensure the OS is actually portable should the need for a switch arise. Like it did in the past with older macos versions. So in that case they even got lucky because it was the very architecture they switched to.
Why isnt anyone talking about that?
I found this article broader and more thought provoking.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/when-the-mismanageri...