6 ms·

Andy Grove and the iPhone SE

166 points by ghosh 11y ago

auggierose 11y ago
> Intel would go on to sell XScale to Marvel in 2006 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.
- akoster 11y ago
  I just had a discussion about the spelling difference with a coworker yesterday, and couldn't believe I didn't notice this today. Good catch!
xd1936 11y ago
Fantastic read, thank you. I too thought about what the iPhone SE means in regards to the (somewhat failed) launch and disappearance of the iPhone 5C. Targeting a lower price with higher-end materials certainly is a turn-around from their strategy a few years ago... I had never considered that the 5C was simply a decision based on manufacturing and supply chain issues, as the article states. Very interesting.
- humbleMouse 11y ago
  I love the iphone 5c. I love that it works great, its fast, it cost me $160 on craigslist, I can throw it across the room or drop it and it doesn't break, etc.
rpgmaker 11y ago
> Andy Grove died yesterday. He is widely considered the greatest CEO in tech history. I thought the consensus was that Steve Jobs was "greatest CEO in tech history". Make up your mind Silicon Valley!
- pchristensen 11y ago
  It might be clearer to say that AG was the best tech CEO in tech history, and SJ was the best CEO in tech history.
pslam 11y ago
> “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do…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. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.” 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.
- rospaya 11y ago
  > 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. 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.
draw_down 11y ago
I've been wondering what is the thing that will come along which Apple totally ignores and ends up dwarfing them. Who knows, but it seems like VR is a possibility. Imagine if someone ships a very immersive VR experience, that's going to be a lot more compelling than the 5" phone screen in your hand. And it doesn't seem to be a space Apple is paying any attention to, though of course they could just be doing things in secret.
- cududa 11y ago
  Over the past 9 months there have been lots of rumblings about them hiring in the space. Tim Cook straight up acknowledged it in the last earnings call - saying he didn't believe it was a niche and there were really interesting use cases. I don't think Apple has ever been as clear on a new product segment.
- kayoone 11y ago
  Apples downfall could be software, especially AI. Google/MS/Amazon or even Facebook all have incredible distributed software systems, lots of AI R&D etc. while Apples attempts are somewhat lackluster.
  - scarface74 11y ago
    I don't think it will be there downfall, all of those companies have failed to make compelling mass market hardware and have shown no lack of willingness to write software for iOS. Whatever they do in AI that benefits the consumer, they will make sure it runs on iOS. 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.
    - scholia 11y ago
      Apple can just buy stuff. It bought Siri, after all.
    - cageface 11y ago
      Google could probably sell a lot of Nexus phones if they really tried. They'd probably burn their bridges with the other Android vendors if they did this though so it would require a pretty significant strategic shift.
findjashua 11y ago
tldr: growth at the expense of margins, like AG did in the late 90s
BIackSwan 11y ago
iPhone SE is at a full 30% premium price as compared to US. So a product priced at the magic price point of INR 27500 is instead at a prohibitive ~ INR 40000 which most consumers in India will balk at. 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.
- monkbent 11y ago
  Read the last footnote
  - canuckintime 11y ago
    Your footnote is still missing the context. The iPhone 5c launched at Rs 41,000 back in 2013 too. While the SE is obviously a better value than the 5c was, it is still priced out of reach for most people and the impact will be marginal in international markets. More likely it will result in more of the Indian elite getting the SE, instead of the 6s, resulting in a lower ASP.
petra 11y ago
One thing i wonder about: iPhone sells on status, for example in china. Would people compromise on something as critical as screen size for status ? Can a small sized screen project status well, even if it's understandable socially that bigger is better ?

166 points by ghosh 11y ago

> Intel would go on to sell XScale to Marvel in 2006 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.

akoster 11y ago
I just had a discussion about the spelling difference with a coworker yesterday, and couldn't believe I didn't notice this today. Good catch!

xd1936 11y ago

Fantastic read, thank you. I too thought about what the iPhone SE means in regards to the (somewhat failed) launch and disappearance of the iPhone 5C. Targeting a lower price with higher-end materials certainly is a turn-around from their strategy a few years ago... I had never considered that the 5C was simply a decision based on manufacturing and supply chain issues, as the article states. Very interesting.

humbleMouse 11y ago
I love the iphone 5c. I love that it works great, its fast, it cost me $160 on craigslist, I can throw it across the room or drop it and it doesn't break, etc.

rpgmaker 11y ago

> Andy Grove died yesterday. He is widely considered the greatest CEO in tech history. I thought the consensus was that Steve Jobs was "greatest CEO in tech history". Make up your mind Silicon Valley!

pchristensen 11y ago
It might be clearer to say that AG was the best tech CEO in tech history, and SJ was the best CEO in tech history.

pslam 11y ago

> “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do…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. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.” 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.

rospaya 11y ago
> 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. 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.

draw_down 11y ago

I've been wondering what is the thing that will come along which Apple totally ignores and ends up dwarfing them. Who knows, but it seems like VR is a possibility. Imagine if someone ships a very immersive VR experience, that's going to be a lot more compelling than the 5" phone screen in your hand. And it doesn't seem to be a space Apple is paying any attention to, though of course they could just be doing things in secret.

cududa 11y ago
Over the past 9 months there have been lots of rumblings about them hiring in the space. Tim Cook straight up acknowledged it in the last earnings call - saying he didn't believe it was a niche and there were really interesting use cases. I don't think Apple has ever been as clear on a new product segment.
kayoone 11y ago
Apples downfall could be software, especially AI. Google/MS/Amazon or even Facebook all have incredible distributed software systems, lots of AI R&D etc. while Apples attempts are somewhat lackluster.
- scarface74 11y ago
  I don't think it will be there downfall, all of those companies have failed to make compelling mass market hardware and have shown no lack of willingness to write software for iOS. Whatever they do in AI that benefits the consumer, they will make sure it runs on iOS. 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.
  - scholia 11y ago
    Apple can just buy stuff. It bought Siri, after all.
  - cageface 11y ago
    Google could probably sell a lot of Nexus phones if they really tried. They'd probably burn their bridges with the other Android vendors if they did this though so it would require a pretty significant strategic shift.

findjashua 11y ago

tldr: growth at the expense of margins, like AG did in the late 90s

BIackSwan 11y ago

iPhone SE is at a full 30% premium price as compared to US. So a product priced at the magic price point of INR 27500 is instead at a prohibitive ~ INR 40000 which most consumers in India will balk at. 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.

monkbent 11y ago
Read the last footnote
- canuckintime 11y ago
  Your footnote is still missing the context. The iPhone 5c launched at Rs 41,000 back in 2013 too. While the SE is obviously a better value than the 5c was, it is still priced out of reach for most people and the impact will be marginal in international markets. More likely it will result in more of the Indian elite getting the SE, instead of the 6s, resulting in a lower ASP.

petra 11y ago

One thing i wonder about: iPhone sells on status, for example in china. Would people compromise on something as critical as screen size for status ? Can a small sized screen project status well, even if it's understandable socially that bigger is better ?