considering how important smartphones are these days you might be a little surprised that more companies haven't
tried to market their own and perhaps none is more surprising than Intel
especially as they're one of the world's biggest producers of both semiconductors
and networking equipment so why doesn't Intel have its own line of phones well
you can learn more about why they specifically don't make cpus for phones
right up here but it turns out that they actually did have their own line of
actual phones not all that long ago back
in 2011 when my age still started with a 2 Intel announced it would try its hand
at bringing a smartphone to market with a processor codenamed medfield our
sister channel Linus tech tips actually looked at it back at ces 2013 and it
seemed like a capable little device with reviews comparing it favorably to the
then current iphone 4s Intel's phones
were interesting not just because they were well from Intel but they were also
powered by an x86 processor the same architecture you can find in your full
fat desktop pc the idea was that by
equipping phones with cpus more capable than the more common ARM chips Intel
could deliver better performance at a lower price especially as Intel already
had literal decades of experience producing x86 chips for the mass market
the idea was that Intel had a full-fledged reference design for an
entire phone built around the medfield CPU Intel then ended up partnering with
cell providers in the uk and in india to get these phones distributed however
these gadgets were never popular enough to propel Intel into the minds of
consumers as a viable choice for phones
but why not the reason is that Intel was
rather late to the smartphone party as it were which is also part of the reason
they still don't even make processors for phones let alone entire devices long
story short Intel's corporate strategy for a long time was to focus on one core
product and that was processors for personal computers not smaller mobile
devices Intel simply failed to recognize the potential of the mobile market until
the iphone was already the coolest thing on the block and by then the portion of
the market that wasn't controlled by apple was quickly being eaten up by
ARM-based Android phones making matters worse was that when medfield phones
finally did arrive on the scene in 2012
Intel was using technology that wasn't particularly
compelling next to its competitors the phones were still using 3g technology
even though this was around the time that lte really started to take off the
iphone 5 for example came out the same year representing the first iphone that
supported lte although Intel did intend to put lte in subsequent phones they
were in a poor position because they didn't offer it from the get-go so
then you have the fact that Intel's phones were designed to be
mid-range products meaning that they didn't really have a flagship to make
themselves stand out think about how samsung for example has multiple
smartphone lines but has gained consumer familiarity through its high-end galaxy
s series one more thing Intel also struggled to find partners to
manufacture medfield devices you see Intel was notorious in the industry for
charging rather high amounts to manufacturers who use its chips they
were able to get away with this with pc companies as Intel had dominated the
desktop CPU market for so long but contracting phone manufacturers to build
Intel phones was more difficult as they didn't want to pay Intel tons of money
for the privilege and major players who did have money like samsung well they
didn't have any desire to seed control over the intellectual property inside
their phones to Intel the result of all this is that Intel never really got a
foothold in the mobile market and although they did end up making
smartphone modems that allowed them to connect to cell networks
they even sold that part of the company to apple just last year so i guess the
moral of the story is that sometimes it just doesn't make sense to show up
fashionably late the cool kids may have already left and made
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