> There was just one problem: The PC era was about to end. Apple was already working on the iPhone, which would usher in the modern smartphone era. Intel turned down an opportunity to provide the processor for the iPhone, believing that Apple was unlikely to sell enough of them to justify the development costs.

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11463818/intel-iphone-mobile-r...

From Paul Otellini exit interview in 2013

>"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… 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.”

The title of the article is "Paul Otellini's Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It?” and that is still a good question a decade later.

https://archive.is/B0Bbs

https://www.zdnet.com/article/arm-shares-tumble-as-transmeta...

in 1997 Intel was terrified of Transmeta, and it lit a fire under their ass to get the Celeron out more quickly...

Me and a colleague worked a F-ton to test out not only the Celeron, AGP, SIMD, OpenGL, Unreal Engine, and all the latest games...

But Intel paid the game devs a Million Marketing bucks if they would optimize their games (and general software) to the SIMD instructions, to make the game feel more subjectively responsive on the Celeron as opposed to the AMD, and the seemingly incoming Transmeta.

so I think that Transmeta was the big blunder, but in reverse ; ; Intel should have been all over gaming, and not been afraid of some plucky startup...

But recall all the senior engineers at intel from <1995 had slide rules and pocket protectors.... they didnt see the entertainment wave of computing early enough and made far too many mistakes and tried to catch up.... personally, I think Linux saved Intel from bankruptcy.

Apple didn't move off Samsung entirely until the A8, and they still rely on many Samsung hardware IPs within the SoC to this day. It was not just a fab arrangement from day 1. https://twitter.com/calebccff/status/1472517091970494465

Apple relied on many of the same suppliers as the rest of the industry for a very long time, except the ones they acquired and closed-off. Purely on a "rising tide lifts all boats basis", Intel would still have had access to the dominant player if the ARM-based touchscreen era wiped out the incumbents. However, this is still a very low-margin business, despite requiring more engineering effort than desktop.

You could argue that $1500 phones were unthinkable at the time, but as a commodity, chipset manufacturers see less than 5-10% percent of that, even on flagship phones.

The problem was that embedded OS-es like Symbian, A200, PalmOS were running circles around Windows Mobile. Most of them used Samsung SoCs which were few times slower than StrongARM.

StrongARM was seen exclusively in the context of it being used to "lift" extremely bloated WinMo smartphones, and was otherwise thought as an overkill for other uses.