[HN Gopher] How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
___________________________________________________________________
How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
Author : chmaynard
Score : 98 points
Date : 2024-08-29 12:46 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thechipletter.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thechipletter.substack.com)
| causi wrote:
| The mid to late xscale era got very weird. Between the 90s and
| early 2000s handheld processors were growing in leaps and bounds.
| At the height in 2004 devices like the Dell x50v were shipping
| with 624mhz xscale chips with a dedicated GPU with 16MB of VRAM.
| Then they just stumbled. Later devices dropped the maximum clock
| speed, dropped the dGPU, even dropped the screen resolution from
| 640x480 to 320x240.
| yial wrote:
| I had a dell x50v. It was truly pretty impressive. I remember
| running psx games on it, with only some issues during cut
| scenes.
|
| But the ability to mostly browse the web on it was amazing.
|
| Also, if I remember correctly, you could adjust the clock speed
| to trade off battery life / performance.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| I had an x50v but you really wanted the x51v. Windows mobile
| 5 really needed the improved NVRAM or otherwise it ran very
| poorly.
|
| Great devices overall. I've been tempted to pick one of these
| up for nostalgia purposes. Truly peak PDAs.
| causi wrote:
| WM5 was a pile of garbage compared to WM 2003. "Let's
| sacrifice a massive chunk of the screen for two useless yet
| omnipresent shortcut buttons."
| bluedino wrote:
| I had a Dell Axim (not sure of the spec), I'm pretty sure
| Dell gave it away for buying a couple Dell branded printers
| or something like that. I also had an HP iPaq which was
| pretty similar (I also think I got Linux running on that one
| somehow).
|
| It could do a few fairly impressive things, like running
| emulators as you mentioned. But I think the problem with
| those was Windows Mobile or Windows CE or whatever they
| called it at the time. The touchscreens stunk as well.
|
| It was just a crappy scaled-down version of Windows. It was
| missing the ability to run actual Windows software. It had a
| browser and a serviceable camera (it helped fulfill my eBay
| addiction at the time), but it wasn't the same as browsing on
| a PC.
|
| It probably still wouldn't have been ideal, but within
| another 2-3 generations it would have been improved/faster
| and then 'good enough', just like the early iPhones.
| hylaride wrote:
| I also had an ipaq ~2003. It didn't have enough storage to
| be a reasonable music or movie player for commutes and
| (mine anyways) only had wifi via a honking PCMCIA adapter
| that drained the battery in no time, so I otherwise browsed
| the web with a laptop. No websites were anywhere near
| designed for small screens in those days, either.
|
| You're right that the OS was garbage, further limiting the
| already limited hardware. I think I also got linux or BSD
| running and messed around with some WEP cracking in my
| neighbourhood for a bit, but then it otherwise sat in a
| drawer.
|
| I was still in school and it was a stupid and expensive
| purchase, but it did teach me to only get new tech if it
| was actually useful and otherwise wait, which as served me
| well since, including the iphone (which the first one was
| barely adequate for what it promised).
| causi wrote:
| You didn't just get a storage card? Between an SD card
| and a CF microdrive I kept a ton of media on my pocket
| PC. Most of the ones that came out in 2003 and onwards
| had bluetooth and wifi built in.
| hylaride wrote:
| Mine definitely did not have integrated wifi. Whatever
| model I had only supported CF, IIRC. Thinking about it,
| it may have been 2001-2002 I had it.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > Thirdly, the success of an Apple phone would not have been hard
| to predict. In 2006 Apple sold nearly 40 million iPods.
|
| I don't like how this whole article is framed as how obvious it
| was that Intel made a huge mistake. Hindsight is 20/20, there was
| no such data available.
|
| It was not predictable that the iPhone would be a success,
| especially not to a degree of Intel sacrificing every profit
| calculation in mere "hope" of huge volume later.
|
| The numbers were there for the iPod. Intel could have just
| pitched to become the SoC-supplier for the iPod and didn't do it.
| They surely crunched the numbers several times and it didn't work
| out.
|
| The first iPhone was then built on the iPod platform with an
| Infineon modem, so the better question to ask is probably: Why
| wasn't Intel interested to supply the CPU for the iPod?
| klelatti wrote:
| > I don't like how this whole article is framed as how obvious
| it was that Intel made a huge mistake. Hindsight is 20/20,
| there was no such data available.
|
| Possibly because Otellini framed it as such?
|
| The latter part of the article answers your other points.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| In 2006, Intel supplied their XScale design to Palm for the
| Treo 700, to Blackberry for the Pearl and Curve AND to HTC
| for use in the XDA/MDA Windows Mobile line, in 2006 arguably
| the much bigger wins as all those were established
| constantly-growing product-lines already on sale globally.
|
| Apple demanding a (probably much) lower price-point to have
| the SoC applied in a mysterious unknown project without a
| volume-commitment could as well have destroyed the business
| and profit-margin for the entire Xscale business for Intel
| and its other customers...
| klelatti wrote:
| > Apple demanding a (probably much) lower price-point to
| have the SoC applied in a mysterious unknown project
| without a volume-commitment could as well have destroyed
| the business and profit-margin for the entire Xscale
| business for Intel and its other customers...
|
| One of the key premises of the article is that Apple likely
| didn't know it was bidding for the iPhone and the decision
| was taken on that basis.
|
| Why is why saying 'Intel turned down the iPhone' is
| problematic.
| baq wrote:
| Otellini's gut feeling was to go for it, the numbers didn't
| pencil and he decided not to and then when it went on the
| market the volumes were two orders of magnitude higher than
| estimated. Should've went for the reality distortion field...
| as you said, hindsight.
| rjsw wrote:
| The PDA/Tablet market was a reasonable size, the XScale CPUs
| were the highest performance ones in this sector, Intel could
| have seen that this market would grow.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| In 2006, Intel supplied their XScale design to Palm for the
| Treo 700, to Blackberry for the Pearl and Curve AND to HTC
| for use in the XDA/MDA Windows Mobile line, in 2006 arguably
| the much bigger wins as all those were established
| constantly-growing product-lines already on sale globally.
|
| Apple demanding a (probably much) lower price-point to have
| the SoC applied in a mysterious unknown project without a
| volume-commitment could as well have destroyed the business
| and profit-margin for the entire Xscale business for Intel
| and its other customers...
| valley_guy_12 wrote:
| There's no reason Intel had to give the same price they
| would have given Apple to another customer.
|
| Intel often cuts prices to favored customers to win
| business, for example they did so for the original Xbox
| CPU, to prevent an AMD from being used.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| There's no reason for other customers to strangle Intel
| or move (again) to TI OMAP platform when they find that
| Apple as a new entrant in their market got favorable
| terms from one of their suppliers...
|
| In 2006, Intel has just won back Palm from TI and were
| under incredible pressure from Qualcomm who had their
| MSM7200 SoC in the pipeline (which integrated both CPU
| and Modem in a single low-power package).
|
| > Intel often cuts prices to favored customers to win
| business, for example they did so for the original Xbox
| CPU, to prevent an AMD from being used.
|
| There's "cutting prices" and then there's selling BELOW
| COST, without a volume-commitment from the customer for
| long-term break-even...
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| The iPod Classic when the iPhone came out had a CPU estimated
| to run around 80 Mhz vs. a 600 Mhz chip underclocked to 400 Mhz
| in the original iPhone. The software is also completely
| different. They didn't build it on the iPod platform at all,
| though I believe that was considered in the early stages of the
| design.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Apple used a newer generation of Samsung's CPU used in the
| iPod to develop both the iPod Touch as well as the iPhone,
| both introduced in 2007.
|
| That's also a reason why the iPhone was not designed around a
| more power-efficient SoC which combined the CPU and the
| cellular Modem into one package: The Modem was the add-on to
| the architecture which turned the iPod Touch into that
| exclusive Phone they built for AT&T.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Apple used a newer generation of Samsung's CPU used in
| the iPod
|
| I mean, that's true only in the same way as your phone uses
| a newer generation of the CPU in your washing machine
| (these days, both are likely to contain ARM cores of some
| sort). They were both ARM SoCs made by Samsung, but the
| relationship kind of ends there; totally different ARM
| core, totally different peripherals, totally different
| everything.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. They developed the next
| generation iPod on the next generation of their iPod CPU
| supplier platform. And then they added a modem and made
| it a phone.
|
| They literally utilized their existing iPod supply chain
| to build the core BOM of the product.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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,...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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"
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| 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.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| 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
| kccqzy wrote:
| The Atlantic article on the interview with Otellini (which this
| article linked to), was very clear that Otellini wanted to say
| yes to the iPhone project but was swayed by data:
|
| > "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak
| with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up
| making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my
| gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes."
|
| It's not even sacrificing profit; it's actively reducing
| profits by selling at a loss.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Did you miss the part of the quote where he shares that
| Intel's cost estimate was wrong?
|
| Also, after the magnitude of their error to get in at the
| ground floor sank in, Intel had no problems with selling x86
| chips at a loss trying to break into mobile devices.
|
| Remember their contra-revenue strategy?
| shalmanese wrote:
| If it wasn't the iPhone, it would have been something else. The
| logic that drove the decision and not the end result was the
| undoing of Intel and the logic would have remained the same as
| long as the culture remained the same.
| klelatti wrote:
| To be clear the article doesn't frame it as being clear it was
| a huge mistake at the time - rather that it's clear now - and
| seeks to explain why that decision was made.
| aa-jv wrote:
| >I don't like how this whole article is framed as how obvious
| it was that Intel made a huge mistake. Hindsight is 20/20,
| there was no such data available.
|
| Intel is a big reason things are so great, but also so crap, in
| computing.
|
| Try to remember, the computing revolution didn't start in the
| 21st century. It's just got incredibly insane, in the 30 years
| of personal computing.
|
| >Why wasn't Intel interested to supply the CPU for the iPod?
|
| Because Intel and Apple had beef, long-since, already. The iPod
| was just another mp3 device, until - suddenly - it wasn't.
|
| The writing on the wall for personal computing has been there
| for _all of the computing pioneer companies .._ the fact that
| Intel and Apple didn 't get connected, is as much about the
| fact that _these people were really in competition with each
| other from the beginning_.
|
| Apple was always going to own its own fabrication capabilities.
| From the outside of the box, _all the way in_.
|
| Intel wanted all the other boxes, not just Apples, too ..
| mdasen wrote:
| Hindsight is also where you can fudge the numbers to justify
| your mistakes. Whenever you're calculating things, there's
| always more optimistic and more pessimistic assumptions. Given
| that competitors were able to supply Apple, it seems slightly
| dubious for Intel to say that there was no way it'd be
| profitable no matter what the volume.
|
| Given Intel's fat margins at the time, it seems like a more
| likely explanation is that it wouldn't meet their margin
| expectations and that they wanted to keep showing their
| investors the great results they'd been used to in the
| desktop/server/laptop markets that Intel was truly dominating
| at the time.
|
| Also, when you're a company, you have limitations on how much
| you can do. You can hire more people and build more fabs, but
| it can be hard to grow your capacity. Even looking at TSMC,
| Apple has been using all of their 3nm capacity for the past
| year. If Intel was thinking about where to allocate its scarce
| resources (whether that be engineers, fab capacity, etc.), it
| might make more sense to concentrate on the areas where you're
| going to have a significant advantage and higher margins -
| unless you really know that Apple is coming out with something
| world-changing, which you wouldn't know in advance. Intel was
| still making enormous gains in the x86 market at this time and
| giving users big reasons to keep upgrading their machines.
| 2008-2010 Intel doubled their performance. The point is that
| there was certainly an opportunity cost to betting on Apple's
| new mystery device where they wanted a low-margin chip and at
| the time Intel's x86 business was booming.
|
| I think there can be other issues as well. Why didn't Intel
| become the iPod SoC? Maybe Intel didn't have such a low-spec'd
| part for that purpose. The XScale processors were higher spec'd
| and Apple certainly didn't need that kind of speed for an iPod.
| Even with the iPhone, the article notes that the Cortex A8
| designs were closing the gap with Intel's XScale, but the
| iPhone didn't use a Cortex A8 until the iPhone 3GS in 2010 (the
| original and 3G used older ARM designs). So part of the issue
| might have been that Intel's XScale processors were powerful
| beyond what Apple wanted to pay for at the time and it would
| have cost Intel money to make what Apple wanted (a low spec
| processor) while others already had that available.
|
| I think it's also hard to say that this decision meant that
| Intel lost out on the iPhone. Realistically, if Apple was going
| with an ARM architecture, Intel would have lost the iPhone in a
| few generations anyway. It's not like Samsung got to keep
| Apple's iPhone CPU business. Maybe Intel could have kept
| Apple's business with heavy investment in XScale, but Apple
| bought PA Semi in April 2008 (less than a year after the
| original iPhone launch). So it seems like Apple was looking to
| build their own processors even before the iPhone became huge
| (the original iPhone only sold around 7M units while iPods were
| selling around 50M/year at the same time). Even if Apple had
| chosen XScale, Intel probably would have lost the iPhone
| business.
|
| And Intel probably wouldn't have made up for it on the Android
| side. Qualcomm's control of CDMA (important for the US) and
| subsequent domination of high-end modems was used to reinforce
| their CPU business. Maybe Intel could have overcome that, but
| we've seen that modems are a hard business - Intel failed in
| its modem business and while Apple has seen huge success in
| their CPU business, they haven't had the same success in
| modems. To put it in perspective, Apple bought PA Semi with 150
| employees in 2008 and 4.5 years later had new custom Swift
| cores in their A6 CPUs. Apple bought Intel's modem business
| with 2,200 employees in 2019 and 5 years later they'll be
| introducing the iPhone 16 still on Qualcomm modems.
|
| So did Intel truly miss out on the iPhone? Maybe somewhat.
| However, it kinda sounds like Intel's XScale business was too
| high-end and even if Apple had selected XScale, they were still
| going to be making their own CPUs given that Apple could
| license the ARM architecture (unlike x86). There certainly was
| some space for Intel, but it would have been a difficult fight
| even if Intel were committed to it. Qualcomm's strategy of
| tying together its patents, CPUs, and modems to reinforce each
| other is hard to overcome.
|
| In hindsight, sure: the mobile market would have been worth
| fighting for. But it seems like it would have been a tough
| market to crack into given what Intel had (a processor too
| high-spec'd for what the market wanted at the time) and the
| fact that vendors could easily switch away from Intel to any
| number of other ARM manufacturers, including ARM's reference
| cores. If Intel had bet big on mobile, they probably could have
| made it a good business for them, but it would have been a big
| gamble for a market without good barriers to entry and where
| competitors like Qualcomm might have their own barriers.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The pre-Touch iPods (the iPod Touch only came out after the
| iPhone) used very small chips; this just wasn't an area Intel
| had an offering in at all, and it would have been very low
| margin.
|
| > The first iPhone was then built on the iPod platform
|
| Eh? No it wasn't. The iPod that existed when the iPhone came
| out was an 80MHz ARM7. The Touch (a 400MHz ARM11) came out a
| few months after the iPhone, and was essentially an iPhone with
| the cellular equipment stripped out.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Intel misjudged how much the part would cost to make. That
| mistake led to a huge missed opportunity.
|
| > Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment
| over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that
| became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple's Mac business,
| he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple's
| paradigm-shifting product.
|
| "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...
|
| 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...
|
| And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume
| was 100x what anyone thought."
|
| https://archive.ph/B0Bbs
| talldayo wrote:
| > Intel misjudged how much the part would cost to make
|
| I just don't buy it. If Intel realized in hindsight that they
| could price out a competitive chip, why didn't they sell it
| to Android manufacturers? So much effort goes into making us
| lament a world where Intel iPhones existed, but I don't even
| see the appeal. Intel didn't have a vested interest in ARM
| (an attitude persisting to this day), they weren't going to
| acquiesce to Apple's desired margins then _or_ now, and Apple
| would always have the logical opportunity to cut out their
| chip middleman. It 's about as appealing as a shit sundae sat
| on a trap door.
|
| > That mistake led to a huge missed opportunity.
|
| Again, was it really that _huge_? After licensing cost to
| ARM, core design fees and the bulk deals worked out, I can 't
| see Apple allowing Intel room to breathe. From a certain
| perspective, it almost seems like Intel never had any desire
| to genuflect for Apple and only signed the Mac deals to
| proliferate their existing design catalog. I can't say for
| sure what the financials worked out to be, but considering
| Mac market share at the time it makes sense why Intel wasn't
| super motivated. If we could look at a modern iPhone bill-of-
| materials, I don't think either of us would feel bad for
| Intel.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| it's always interesting finding out about a myth for the first
| time from the content that debunks it
| bgribble wrote:
| I worked for an Intel spinoff whose CEO was a former high-level
| Intel exec from the 1990-2010 era. Internal goss attributed much
| of Intel's decision to stay out of the iPhone to him... there was
| a supposed quote that went something like "we make chips for
| computers, not g*d** telephones!"
|
| As the tale went, he was sent out to this doomed-from-birth
| spinoff as a "sunset cruise" to basically force him into
| retirement (for this bad decision) without the bad publicity of a
| public head-chopping.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I still don't understand why people make such a big deal out of
| ,,missing the iPhone".
|
| There was no money in mobile SoCs, and there still isn't. Apple
| makes their own chips anyway!
|
| Intel was right to focus on the x86.
| PopePompus wrote:
| Well volume is an issue. Even a low margin part which has
| very high volume sales can help you afford to build leading
| edge Fabs, and keep process technology leadership.
| m_mueller wrote:
| I think TSMC, ASML and ARM are making quite good money on the
| iPhone. And so did Samsung for a while before the Apple A4
| came out.
| klelatti wrote:
| Apple doesn't make their own chips TSMC does and TSMC
| generated net income of US$26 billion in 2023.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| That is actually a good point - the fab process would turn
| out to become another weak point (besides the missing moat
| of ARM) of Intel. There is no way Apple would watch TSMCs
| leadership year after year and still stick with Intel fabs.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Definitely not; at one point the iPhone chip was actually
| dual-sourced!
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/9708/analyzing-apple-
| statemen...
| MBCook wrote:
| Apple _hates_ being beholden to one company. It's bitten
| them many times in the past.
|
| I suspect if anyone else could keep up with TSMC Apple
| would still dual source.
|
| But between their lead and the benefits of being such a
| big customer they get first crack at the cutting edge
| stuff, single sourcing manufacturing probably makes the
| most sense.
|
| And their interests are aligned, unlike their
| dependencies on MS/Adobe/Motorola/IBM/Intel.
| sholladay wrote:
| Apple designs their own chips, but they don't make them.
|
| In any other context, that might be splitting hairs but it's
| a meaningful distinction in this conversation.
| pests wrote:
| I think it's still splitting hairs.
|
| Even though I sent my prints out to be printed by shapeways
| or whatever, I still tell people "I made" those parts.
| zamfi wrote:
| The point here is that there is tons of money to be made
| in _manufacturing_ those chips that Intel lost out on by
| ignoring mobile. That "Apple makes their own chips" does
| not alone mean Intel could not have profited from this --
| as indeed TSMC, ASML, and ARM are.
| kaibee wrote:
| This analysis misses kinda a major point. The nice thing
| about making mobile SOCs is that the yields are more
| forgiving. If you have 1000mm^2 of silicon that you're
| slicing into 10mm^2 dies, each defect (of which there
| will be many on early leading nodes), will only cost you
| a 10mm^2 chip, instead of a 50mm^2 chip. And because
| you're making them in volume, you get many many cycles to
| improve your process before you try to make bigger chips
| with it, ie: CPUs/GPUs. And because Apple wanted the
| increased performance/battery life, they reserved
| capacity from TSMC on these leading nodes in advance,
| helping to finance their development while providing a
| garunteed customer that was going to buy in volume. This
| gave TSMC a huuuge advantage over Intel that materialzied
| around ~2018.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Apple designs their own chips now. but the original iPhone,
| used a Samsung chip.
|
| Intel didn't just miss out on business as a fab, Apple
| would have used their chip design as well.
|
| Which leads you to wonder if Apple still would have begun
| designing chips themselves, if Intel had put some real
| effort into designing mobile chips.
| aa-jv wrote:
| >"Apple makes their own chips anyway!"
|
| Apple can only do that now, because of the billions they have
| made on the iPhone, plain and simple.
|
| And - more importantly - they were well geared to do that,
| _since the beginning of computing_.
|
| There being no money in SoC's, is because they're all being
| made across the other side of the planet, mostly, from the
| intended final users.
|
| If Intel were really 'leading edge', they'd have made desk-
| side custom fabrication a thing in the makerspace already.
| Such that I can, as a computer user, print 10 or 20 or X
| little chips, for my own specific purposes, non-mass-market.
|
| This would be a truly revolutionary adventure from a
| 'grandfather of computing' style company.
|
| Alas, the x86 is, indeed, everywhere. Grandfather Intel has a
| massive garden.
|
| If only the SoC battles were truly localized, and a real
| computing revolution can happen (before its too late).
|
| You should have a locally-built device in your hand.
| jorvi wrote:
| > There was no money in mobile SoCs, and there still isn't
|
| Qualcomm market cap: $193 billion
|
| TSMC market cap: $888 billion
|
| Seems designing and fabbing SoCs is plenty valuable
| adventured wrote:
| > TSMC market cap: $25 billion
|
| Taiwan Semi's market cap is $888 billion. They're -
| remarkably - now worth 10x what Intel is.
| jorvi wrote:
| Huh, you are right. I already had a feeling it was
| suspiciously low. I'll correct it, thanks!
| razakel wrote:
| But it proved ARM had a mature ecosystem with lots of
| developers...
| dagmx wrote:
| Apple _designs_ their own chips now. They didn't for a good
| many years.
|
| Intel could have moved big volumes during that period. At the
| very least they could have been a fab.
|
| They also largely switched to their own chips because vendors
| weren't meeting their needs.
|
| Again, Intel could have staved it off on both computers and
| phones if they didn't mess up so badly on delivery over the
| last several years.
| xt00 wrote:
| Yea it definitely felt like at the time Intel was in a tough
| spot.. while the article is stating that the narrative about
| the margins being narrow for arm chips so Intel was nervous
| about the area, one thing I can attest to is that even if
| that narrative was false when it comes to Apple, competitors
| of Apple at the time definitely would be assuming that if
| Intel went into that space that they gave Apple a good price,
| so just the perception of them selling a good chip to Apple
| could have hurt Intel's fat profit margins. Like Apple was
| selling phones for the same price Intel was selling chips for
| -- so maybe the higher cost could be justified by Apple who
| knows, but the perception of Intel's profit margin they are
| willing to live with impacts their negotiations with other
| customers dramatically as well.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| When I think back to that time period (serving tables, T9
| texting in my apron on my Blackberry Pearl lol) I remember the
| touch screen being a tough learning curve for the majority of
| people.
|
| The first iPhone was also gigantic, hideous, couldn't send
| pictures - something even a cheap $20 Samsung from the carrier
| could do - and it also didn't sell very well. People were more
| into "The Google phone", the Sidekiq, or the latest Razr. Think
| it wasn't til the 3GS came out with a ton of marketing push
| that it started to gain popularity, and it ended up having more
| to do with the App Store than the hardware - people did not
| like those touch screens for the first several years of
| smartphones. They came out at the height of texting and
| ringtone era, and we were pretty set in our ways, and it took
| years to change that behavior.
|
| I think the App Store resonated a lot more with people back
| then rather than the iPhone as a device. MySpace was still
| around, the Bush-era recession had everyone looking for a side
| hustle. Most young/ambitious people I was around in "tech"
| (which was effectively HTML-based SEO and WordPress design) had
| a Blackberry and a side business. This kid I worked with became
| "rich" from an iPhone app that just combined other iPhone apps
| haha. Loved that time period. Graffitio!
|
| Would have been very hard to predict the success of the iPhone,
| even as I was already entering orders for customers on a fully
| touch screen Aloha point-of-sale long before iPhone.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| To be honest, I think you're badly misremembering that era.
| People were calling the iPhone "the Jesus Phone" after the
| original keynote announcement, the lines on launch day were
| around the block, and upon release, there were definitely
| tons of flame wars around physical vs. touchscreen keyboards
| but there was a widespread consensus that the iPhone's
| predictive typing correction was pretty good and that the
| touchscreen was miles ahead of any similar-equipped phone
| (many of which were still resistive, ugh!).
|
| It definitely didn't get mainstream popularity until the
| 3GS/4 and the App Store, but people were definitely
| interested from day 1. Don't forget that early builds of
| Android looked much more like a Blackberry clone until the
| iPhone was announced, and then Google immediately scrapped
| everything and rewrote it from the ground up to be iPhone-
| like.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| It just proves that no matter what you make and how
| innovative a product it is someone will come along a decade
| later and claim it was nothing but marketing fluff.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You're right. The first iPhone was so bad that "the Google
| phone" was delayed by many months as they scrambled to
| completely redesigned their launch phone to be multitouch
| instead of keyboard.
|
| The razr2 sold 5M units and the sidekick sold 3M to iPhone
| 1's 6.1M.
|
| The n95 did outsell the iPhone with 10M units but Nokia had a
| massively more mature sales pipeline whereas Apple had to
| build out carrier relations. It also shipped before the
| iPhone was even announced which gave it time to accumulate
| sales.
|
| Everyone in the space though recognized how big it was
| because carriers were going out of their way to try to get it
| on their network (since at the time Apple was doing 1 carrier
| per country). Apple got lucky that AT&T bought Singular which
| made the iPhone accessible to many many more people.
|
| 3GS's 37 million units was because Apple had 2 years to build
| up manufacturing capacity and carrier sales channels to match
| demand for what had become clearly a smartphone revolution.
| foobarian wrote:
| The big things I remember from that era is that the iPhone
| was the first phone with an unlimited data plan which
| Apple/Jobs beat AT&T into submission to get. Until then you
| had to worry about every last byte you used on the dinky
| carrier-grade apps and the lousy WAP websites.
|
| This worry removed, and the fact you actually had a real
| browser that could open real websites were the two main
| features that to me seemed like a huge leap forward.
| theatrus2 wrote:
| Its also clear that the carrier wasn't ready for it.
| People with the original iPhone would get entire boxes
| mailed to them for their Cingular statement, itemizing
| every data transaction, but then all flat rate charged.
| S_A_P wrote:
| I had an original iPhone and did not get such statements.
| As I recall while Cingular was indeed not ready to handle
| unlimited data for customers, it wasn't really a problem
| for the first iPhone since it wasn't 3g. Once the 3g
| dropped , it was a problem since people were actually
| able to consume a large amount of data.
| goosedragons wrote:
| It very famously happened to iJustine:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdULhkh6yeA
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| keyboard and scroll ball integrated beneath it on the proto
| google phone...we had one at qualcomm
| duskwuff wrote:
| The scroll ball showed up on some early production
| devices, like the HTC Dream. Directional keypads lasted
| even longer.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i'd forgotten the directional keypads!
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| According to a quick search the 2006 Razr sold 50 million
| units (130 million total) but the first iPhone only sold
| 1.4 million when it released in 2007. iPhone was nowhere
| near Razr sales. Your comment is a bit disingenuous because
| that was the less popular Razr after flip phones were on
| the way out.
|
| Nokia and Blackberry were selling a lot more than both
| brands at the time. Blackberry alone had 20%+ market share
| when the Pearl was released. Nokia sold the most phones by
| far.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You're comparing unrelated things and completely
| discounting that Apple was a completely new entrant into
| the space vs entrenched players that had already
| established sales channels and carrier relations and were
| selling globally vs US-only to start for Apple.
|
| Apple sold over 6M units of the first iPhone unless
| you're saying 1.4M in the first quarter after launch
| since it launched in September. I was comparing it to
| phones released at a similar time and claiming that
| sidekick was somehow more successful is straight up
| laughable regardless of how you look at it.
|
| The first iPhone defined what the smartphone category
| should be. Google took heed which saved Android. Nokia
| and blackberry did not and you can tell where they're at
| now.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > Apple was a completely new entrant into the space vs
| entrenched players that had already established sales
| channels
|
| So? If anything it supports the point that iPhone wasn't
| an immediate success. It wasn't as successful as the Razr
| flip phone was before it, not for a while. The original
| point was just that it would have been difficult to
| predict the success of iPhone even after it released,
| because it didn't do that well at first.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)
|
| > In its first week, Apple had sold 270,000 iPhones
| domestically.[47] Apple sold the one millionth iPhone 74
| days after the release.[48] Apple reported in January
| 2008 that four million were sold.[49] As of Q4 2007,
| strong iPhone sales put Apple no. 2 in U.S. smartphone
| vendors, behind Research In Motion and ahead of all
| Windows Mobile vendors.[50]
|
| > As of October 2007, the iPhone was the fourth best-
| selling handset in the U.S., trailing the Motorola RAZR
| V3, the LG Chocolate, and the LG VX8300.[51]
|
| I'd say being the #2 smartphone vendor on your first
| model and beating all Windows Mobile would be a fantastic
| first step and a clear indicator it would be extremely
| successful in addition to being #4 across all us
| handsets. 4M were sold in the first 6 months. You're just
| simply misremembering how big it was and how well it
| sold.
|
| The 3G version the next year sold 4x as many units (25M)
| . You could say it's because 3G was such a huge upgrade
| our other software things like mms and App Store, but the
| first iPhone was in 6 countries while 3G was in 22 and
| got to 70. The 3GS did outdo the growth of that since it
| shipped 5M more units than would be explained just by
| being available in more countries (80 vs 70).
|
| Could you predict it would end up dominating the
| smartphone market even as that market ate up more of the
| legacy feature phone market? Maybe that's harder but the
| iPhone's success wasn't all that hard. The lack of any
| competition that could really keep up was another
| indicator. Android was a pretty big failure for a few
| years until enough of the feature set became parity and
| table stakes that people felt comfortable using it (or
| because Android was available in a lower price segment
| Apple wasn't competing in).
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > entrenched > a fantastic first step
|
| It's not like Apple was some scrappy startup going up
| against giants, when their profits had been in the
| billions for years prior to the iPhone, which by the way
| followed the MacBook launch in 2006.
|
| > strong iPhone sales put Apple ... behind Research In
| Motion
|
| Are you aware that RIM is Blackberry? This is what I've
| been saying, iPhone was behind the others like
| Blackberry, Razr, Nokia, etc.
|
| > As of October 2007, the iPhone was the fourth best-
| selling handset in the U.S., trailing the Motorola RAZR
| V3, the LG Chocolate, and the LG VX8300.
|
| Yep. 1 million is a lot, but Razr was selling 10s of
| millions, Blackberry and Nokia were selling more than
| that. But yeah I guess iPhone had the super cheap carrier
| phones beat, but they weren't meant to be high end
| products.
|
| > The 3G version the next year sold 4x as many
|
| Yeah that's when it started to take over. Especially when
| the 3GS / $99 AT&T plan came out, everyone got it by
| then.
|
| Predicting hits: What about bluetooth headsets? They were
| forcing them on us around the same time period we're
| talking about now... but only a few geeky dads and cheesy
| business guys used them, eventually they weren't really
| sold anywhere, comedians had been referencing them at
| this point. Having lived through that era I would have
| never predicted the success of Airpods. As I said in my
| above post it wasn't like we didn't have touchscreen
| devices. I don't recall being as receptive to the
| touchscreen as you do, seemed like most people outside
| the Apple cult initially hated it.
| MBCook wrote:
| The 3G was also released with the App Store, which we all
| know quickly became a huge hit.
|
| The iPhone 2G was an interesting phone. But there were no
| 3rd party apps until the software update that came out at
| the same time as the 3G.
|
| The 3G had (insert app here). And boy did that drive
| sales.
| saghm wrote:
| > The n95 did outsell the iPhone with 10M units but Nokia
| had a massively more mature sales pipeline whereas Apple
| had to build out carrier relations.
|
| Am I remembering correctly that originally the iPhone only
| supported AT&T? My family all was on a shared Verizon plan
| at the time, and I have a vague recollection of the fact
| that it wasn't an option for us, but I'm not positive I
| remember correctly. Nowadays, the idea of a phone not being
| possible to purchase for a given network seems silly, but I
| feel like it was a thing at the time.
| mperham wrote:
| > Am I remembering correctly that originally the iPhone
| only supported AT&T?
|
| Yes, for the first few years. Within a year or two, the
| writing was on the wall and the other providers were
| dying to get it.
| MBCook wrote:
| Which is partly why the Motorola(?) Droid phones got so
| popular.
|
| Verizon couldn't have the iPhone, so they pushed that as
| their equivalent with a huge marketing campaign. Always
| felt to me like that single-handedly pushed Android into
| the public consciousness.
|
| Like without that maybe Android would be huge, but we
| updated have gotten the name recognition. Or at least not
| so fast, and instead would have been more of an
| implementation detail in most people's minds.
|
| Sprint tried to compete with the Palm Pre which was neat
| but had issues. Then Verizon got the Pre and Sprint's
| last shot at relevance died.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I think your memory is a bit hazy. Jaws dropped during the
| keynote. People disassembled it on day one doubting it was
| real.
| MBCook wrote:
| RIM famously thought they faked the keynote and what they
| showed was impossible.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> They came out at the height of texting and ringtone era,
| and we were pretty set in our ways, and it took years to
| change that behavior._
|
| Nah. The only reason the iphone didn't take off faster was
| that, for its time, it was _extremely_ expensive.
|
| $600 upfront _plus_ a 24-month, $60 /month contract [1].
| That's $2000 back in 2007, or $3000 today.
|
| [1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/iphone_contract_pr
| ice...
| valley_guy_12 wrote:
| Second reason it didn't take off faster was that iPhone was
| typically a carrier exclusive, and in most markets, the
| iPhone carrier was typically one of the smaller carriers.
| So iPhone wasn't available to most mobile phone users in a
| given market, unless they went to the trouble of switching
| carriers.
| MBCook wrote:
| Plus the App Store was a massive driver of demand, but
| wasn't there until year 2 and the release of the 3G.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| If you were around when the first decent iPhone released
| (2008) you'd remember that everyone had one for $99 on
| AT&T, where non smartphones were still like ~$300, so I'd
| say you have it backwards.
|
| Maybe you weren't old enough, or are from another country.
| Everybody remembers this, it was a great idea on their part
| as it got everyone using iPhones.
| goosedragons wrote:
| That wasn't release though...
|
| Prices for the 2G iPhone really were that high and Apple
| even cut the price after a few months because it wasn't
| moving like expected.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Ah yeah true, re-reading not even sure why I replied like
| that
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| A living proof that there is always someone who can find the
| wrong of the thing that everyone else loves
| mannyv wrote:
| My neighbor used to be in procurement at Intel. He said that the
| chip guys told him that TSMC's prices were impossible. Just one
| more data point.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| IIRC, the iwmmxt instructions used similar encodings to some of
| arms vfp extensions, threatening to bifurcate the arm ecosystem
| (this is alluded to in the article).
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