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Considering how important smartphones are these days, you might be a little surprised

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that more companies haven't tried to market their own. And perhaps none is more surprising than

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

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networking equipment. So why doesn't Intel have its own line of phones? Well, you can learn more

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about why they specifically don't make CPUs for phones right up here, but it turns out that they

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actually did have their own line of actual phones not all that long ago. Back in 2011,

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when my age still started with a 2, Intel announced it would try its hand at bringing

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a smartphone to market with a processor codamed Medfield. Our sister channel Linus Tech Tips

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actually looked at it back at CES 2013 and it seemed like a capable little device,

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with reviews comparing it favorably to the then current iPhone 4s.

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Intel's phones were interesting not just because they were, well, from Intel,

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but they were also 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 equipping phones with CPUs more capable than the more common

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ARM chips, Intel could deliver better performance at a lower price, especially as Intel already had

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literal decades of experience producing x86 chips for the mass market. The idea was that Intel had

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a full-fledged reference design for an entire phone built around the Medfield CPU. Intel then

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ended up partnering with cell providers in the UK and in India to get these phones distributed.

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

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as a viable choice for phones, but why not? The reason is that Intel was rather

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late to the smartphone party as it were, which is also part of the reason they still don't even

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make processors for phones, let alone entire devices. Long story short, Intel's corporate

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strategy for a long time was to focus on one core product, and that was processors for personal

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computers, not smaller mobile devices. Intel simply failed to recognize the potential of the

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mobile market until the iPhone was already the coolest thing on the block, and by then,

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the portion of the market that wasn't controlled by Apple was quickly being eaten up by ARM-based

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Android phones. Making matters worse was that when Medfield phones finally did arrive on the

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scene in 2012, Intel was using technology that wasn't particularly compelling next to its competitors.

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The phones were still using 3G technology even though this was around the time that LTE really

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started to take off. The iPhone 5, for example, came out the same year, representing the first

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iPhone that supported LTE. Although Intel did intend to put LTE in subsequent phones,

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they 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 themselves stand out.

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Think about how Samsung, for example, has multiple smartphone lines,

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but has gained consumer familiarity through its high-end Galaxy S series.

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One more thing, Intel also struggled to find partners to manufacture Medfield devices. You see,

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Intel was notorious in the industry for charging rather high amounts to manufacturers

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who use its chips. They were able to get away with this with PC companies as Intel had dominated

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the desktop CPU market for so long, but contracting phone manufacturers to build Intel phones was

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more difficult, as they didn't want to pay Intel tons of money for the privilege,

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and major players who did have money like Samsung,

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

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inside 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 smartphone modems that

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allowed them to connect to cell networks, they even sold that part of the company to Apple just

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last year. So I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes it just doesn't make sense to

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show up fashionably late. The cool kids may have already left and made billions of dollars

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selling phones that people actually want. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video,

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give it a thumbs up, get subscribed, and be sure to hit us up in the comments section

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with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.