Intel Corp (INTC)

[ibc]

If a smartphone would be good enough for doing everything a PC does, wouldn't it be also good enough to do what a smartphone does going into the future? If that would really be the case, why would anyone buy a faster smartphone then (don't bother telling me about 2 year contracts in the US, the world is much bigger than that)?

This is already happening to some extent in the high-end and has arguably already happened in large-tablets (upgrade cycles elongating).
Smartphone units are still showing high growth since the market isn't saturated yet - especially in the low-end where many don't have a smartphone yet.

Also witness how smartphones are becoming more like fashion accessories vs. utilitarian devices to spur upgrades.

If good enough would actually hold true, the whole semiconductor industry would be on fire, don't you realize that?

There is still replacement demand.
There is still innovation where new semiconductors provide new capability.
Semiconductors in-aggregate are a mature industry (cyclical) that goes up and down with GDP. It's not a growth industry.

Are you suggesting it is easy to match Intel in the high performance domain as it is in the low power domain for ARM vendors?

No. I'm saying that the PC market is over-served by CPU performance and i3-level performance is good-enough. Witness how folks are willing to trade CPU performance for mobility (Core-M vs. Core-i5/i7). Benchmarking the new Macbooks shows it's slower than 2-3 year old macbook airs, but it sells at a premium to macbook air.

Furthermore, Apple and others can differentiate from Intel with non-CPU features (comms, gpu, dsp etc.) and tighter hardware/software integration.