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Comment by fuzzythinker | Hacker News Reader

No, it wasn't obvious. But it coming from Apple, who choose to go after the portable music player market ignoring the new hotness PDA and that ipod segment becoming the majority of its market cap. When that happened, as the CEO of #1 cpu maker, you have to spend more than a cursory effort into what is Apple's bet on this. Even to me, a nobody, had guessed at the iphone rumor, before the magically reveal, that it will be become Apple's main product, way surpassing even the ipod. Apple choosing to ignore the PDA market gave me an almost certain conclusion that they only ignored it due to technical challenges to produce a rivaling product that they were proud of and after years of wait, they were finally able to produce it.

So yes, hindsight is 20/20, but as CEO of intel, he failed miserably from not putting more effort into the decision making.

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> Even to me, a nobody, had guessed at the iphone rumor, before the magically reveal, that it will be become Apple's main product, way surpassing even the ipod.

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.

Come on man, if it wasn't Apple it would be some other manufacturer that would produce a dominant PDA+phone device using ARM CPUs.

Feature phones were already outpacing PC growth by then and Intel decided to snub the market. Canceling XScale was a truly stupid decision.

And they would have been just as shitty as the Blackberry. Hell, even Google had to go back to the drawing board with their Android prototype because they still thought a physical keyboard on a phone was king....right until they caught a glimpse of the first iPhone.

i loved the blackberry keyboard and would take it anytimes over this fucking iphone keyboard. The iphone keyboard is a step backwards. people like haptic feedback.

tens of millions of consumers say otherwise

The middle of the bell curve, which dominates the market, has a need for drool-proof interfaces that many of the sort who frequent HN and similar interest communities do not.

Swipe typing > physical keyboard > digital keyboard.

There's still phones made these days with physical keyboards if you truly value the feature.

Which was already the case at that time, with Blackberry, Palm and HTC dominating that market using Intel XScale.

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

I think the gap was market size estimation. Intel was (is?) famously not interested in businesses that can’t generate $1B of incremental revenue in the first year or two.

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.

yeah, but according to the article it wasn't even clear at that point that it's a phone project. It was too early to even make such predicitions.

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,...

And of course by the time a market exists for that dollar figure, Intel has been beaten hopelessly, such that there is no hope for as stodgy and apathetic Intel is culturally.

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

Don't forget that Apple's previous phone effort in 2005 was a collaboration with Motorola on the ROKR, aka "iTunes Phone", which was a normal motorola phone except it could sync with iTunes and play media like an iPod

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"

There is a famous clip of Jobs trying to demo the ROKR on stage at an Apple press event. His disdain is palpable.

This would be the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWSRgsk2oaw

I agree. Apple was ascending again and everything they did seemed to be a hit. I think the real question is how large of a bet did Intel really need to make. No it might not have made sense on immediate ROI alone, but Intel had only to defend its position.

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