WEBVTT

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considering how important smartphones are these days you might be a little surprised that more companies haven't

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tried to market their own and perhaps none is more surprising than Intel

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especially as they're one of the world's biggest producers of both semiconductors

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and networking equipment so why doesn't Intel have its own line of phones well

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you can learn more about why they specifically don't make cpus for phones

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right up here but it turns out that they actually did have their own line of

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actual phones not all that long ago back

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in 2011 when my age still started with a 2 Intel announced it would try its hand

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at bringing a smartphone to market with a processor codenamed medfield our

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sister channel Linus tech tips actually looked at it back at ces 2013 and it

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seemed like a capable little device with reviews comparing it favorably to the

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then current iphone 4s Intel's phones

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were interesting not just because they were well from Intel but they were also

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powered by an x86 processor the same architecture you can find in your full

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fat desktop pc the idea was that by

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equipping phones with cpus more capable than the more common ARM chips Intel

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could deliver better performance at a lower price especially as Intel already

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had literal decades of experience producing x86 chips for the mass market

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the idea was that Intel had a full-fledged reference design for an

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entire phone built around the medfield CPU Intel then ended up partnering with

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cell providers in the uk and in india to get these phones distributed however

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these gadgets were never popular enough to propel Intel into the minds of

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consumers as a viable choice for phones

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but why not the reason is that Intel was

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rather late to the smartphone party as it were which is also part of the reason

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they still don't even make processors for phones let alone entire devices long

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story short Intel's corporate strategy for a long time was to focus on one core

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product and that was processors for personal computers not smaller mobile

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devices Intel simply failed to recognize the potential of the mobile market until

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the iphone was already the coolest thing on the block and by then the portion of

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the market that wasn't controlled by apple was quickly being eaten up by

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ARM-based Android phones making matters worse was that when medfield phones

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finally did arrive on the scene in 2012

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Intel was using technology that wasn't particularly

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compelling next to its competitors the phones were still using 3g technology

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even though this was around the time that lte really started to take off the

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iphone 5 for example came out the same year representing the first iphone that

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supported lte although Intel did intend to put lte in subsequent phones they

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were in a poor position because they didn't offer it from the get-go so

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then you have the fact that Intel's phones were designed to be

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mid-range products meaning that they didn't really have a flagship to make

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themselves stand out think about how samsung for example has multiple

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smartphone lines but has gained consumer familiarity through its high-end galaxy

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s series one more thing Intel also struggled to find partners to

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manufacture medfield devices you see Intel was notorious in the industry for

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charging rather high amounts to manufacturers who use its chips they

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were able to get away with this with pc companies as Intel had dominated the

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desktop CPU market for so long but contracting phone manufacturers to build

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Intel phones was more difficult as they didn't want to pay Intel tons of money

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for the privilege and major players who did have money like samsung well they

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didn't have any desire to seed control over the intellectual property inside

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their phones to Intel the result of all this is that Intel never really got a

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foothold in the mobile market and although they did end up making

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smartphone modems that allowed them to connect to cell networks

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they even sold that part of the company to apple just last year so i guess the

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moral of the story is that sometimes it just doesn't make sense to show up

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fashionably late the cool kids may have already left and made

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billions of dollars selling phones that people actually want speaking of things you

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this video give it a thumbs up get subscribed and be sure to hit us up in the comments section with your

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