> “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.”<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So yes, it's a great shame Intel missed that incredible opportunity at a pivotal moment. But no, it was not an economic decision.
> Intel would go on to sell XScale to Marvel in 2006<p>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 <i>MarvelL</i>.
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.
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.
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 ?
> Andy Grove died yesterday. He is widely considered the greatest CEO in tech history.<p>I thought the consensus was that <i>Steve Jobs</i> was "greatest CEO in tech history". Make up your mind Silicon Valley!
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.<p>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.