Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

Ideal Inv: You are still misrembering what happened...

I was at those sales conferences. Intel had big dreams about getting in to phones back then. But they could not get by Texas Instruments. Back then TI dominated phone silicon. The real issue was that the phone manufacturers didn't want to pay what Intel wanted and they absolutely didn't want what happened in the PC market. They wanted cheap silicon as chipguy suggested. Now Qualcomm did ultimately displace TI somewhat(they still have silicon in todays phones but not as much). But Qualcomm did it on the back of their CDMA modem technology. And Apple just went its own way and acquirred an ARM design company. Even if Intel had gotten the first iPhone design, I believe Apple would have started its own chip company. Why not? They have billions of dollars sitting around. And even if they didn't Intel was never guaranteed to keep the design for long. The problem with ARM is that any old company can design a chip with it. And that means you can get booted from a design very easily. You don't recall obviously, but Intel had already started losing pocket PC designs to Samsung. HP was the culprit in that episode. Because it was cheaper and it was ARM and worked fine.