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Comment by ChrisIsTaken | Hacker News Reader

Apple did poach a few of Intel's better architects and killed Intel's smartphone ambitions. But the damage occured two decades before that.

Intel is dying because they should have entered the foundry business in the early 90's. Process was always their forte, they were never good at the CPU architecture design anyway as iAPX/i860/Itanium amply demonstrated.

Instead they blew $100B getting into antivirus, network security, mobileye, infineon, and a dozen other failed businesses, $50B in illegal kickbacks keeping AMD out of the unprofitable low end laptop market, and another $50B of "contra revenue" subsidizing their inferior me-too products against mobile SOCs they should have been fabbing in the first place.

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I'm curious about how Apple "killed Intel's smartphone ambitions"?

Otellini on the iPhone:

"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it."

"At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

"And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

And in hindsight, he was a moron, unqualified to lead an engineering company.

When people point to MBAs ruining Intel. Point to that statement.

You could invest in emerging markets.

Or rearrange financial statements deck chairs to hit your stock options and roll your eyes at the nerds.

It's easy in hindsight, nobody knew iphone would take off so strongly. Did you sell the house and load up on Apple stock at the time?

While I agree it's easy in hindsight, you're not comparing apples to oranges here: comparing the comment author to a person running a business, with very high expertise in particular subject (chip making) and general subject (technology), having access to information not accessible to others (Apple plans and visions about the product, tech specs required, price asked, etc.) is not even close to being the same thing. I can see how a much better decision could be made very realistically given that expertise and information no one else had and yet the worst possible was made.

Nice insight...

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