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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.
by rickdeckard 2y ago
> 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.
- CoolGuySteve 2y agoCome 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.
- pak9rabid 2y agoAnd 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.
- bratwurst3000 2y agoi 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.
- pirate787 2y agotens of millions of consumers say otherwise
- ChainOfFools 2y agoThe 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.
- dmonitor 2y agoSwipe typing > physical keyboard > digital keyboard. There's still phones made these days with physical keyboards if you truly value the feature.
- rickdeckard 2y agoWhich 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