My hunch--I'm not an analyst with an interested in very detailed numbers, meeting with Intel and its competitors, etc.--is that Intel needs to pour money into "mobile" even if it's presently losing money.
I believe that if it cedes the mobile market to ARM and the foundries, it will ultimately face erosion upwards.
It faced a tough decision in the mid-80s to withdraw from the highly-competitive DRAM market, a market it had pioneered of course. Many of us were shocked. But it appears to have been the correct decision, looking back.
Withdrawing from the mobile market just because it's currently losing money would be suicidal, I think.
Also, things are looking pretty darned good for Intel in tablets (excluding the iPad, which is dominant). A related point: a lot of customers seem to be willing to pay the Apple prices for a product with a perceived better ecosystem of apps, as opposed to low-end tablets from Asus and the like. This seems to carry over to laptops. High-priced laptops from Apple seem to be doing darned well, while "Chromebooks" seem to be bought by parents who can't afford better. This is my impression....maybe in Asian markets it's quite different.
(I expect Apple to push down toward tablets with a MacBook Air with Retina-type display. I'm surprised one has not already appeared. Could be out very soon. I currently use a 15-inch MacBook Pro, Retina model. I'm using it right now. I love it to pieces! All my main apps. But I would consider a 2.5 pound Air with a 13-inch screen, 512 GB SSD, 16 GB DRAM, Retina-like display as an even more portable model. I would be thrilled if such a machine were to come out under $1000. I haven't given one nanosecond of though to replacing my iPad 3 with a newer, thinner, faster model. It does the job. What I really want is that one kilo Air. Then it would be my "go everywhere" model.)
Back to Intel and its money-losing (we'll see....) on mobile.
The competition in the chip-making for mobile is currently not nearly as "bad" as it was when Intel faced that mid-80s government-subsidized consortium of DRAM makers: Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Matsushita, and even some lesser names (a steel company whose name I've forgotten). Plus the Korean "chaebols" and Taiwan were getting geared-up.
(In my opinion, the Japanese wrongly bet on both DRAMs as a driver and on things like the "Fifth Generation Computer Project" and utterly missed-out on workstations, graphics, the PC, data bases, and all of things which came to dominated in the 90s and later.)
Fortunately, my "hunch" is almost certainly what Intel has very carefully planned to pursue.
--Tim
AI
