Shamelessly stolen from the comments at http://anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smartpho...

"The short answer: margins.

The long answer: Intel could absolutely build a killer smartphone SoC on the 14nm process. However it would need to be Core based; the Atom CPU line isn't performant enough. They may need to go back to Ivy Bridge or strip down Skylake a bit to get there, but they could do it.

The issue is that smartphone SoCs have very low margins. MediaTek, Rockchip, etc are crushing the market. Atom is designed for margins, not performance. If Intel built a winning Core smartphone SoC, then they'd have to sell it for significantly lower margins than what their other Core parts sell for. And that in turn would put pressure on the rest of their chip stack; why should an OEM pay $250 for Core-M when you could get a similar smartphone SoC for $30?

For what it's worth Apple faces a similar challenge. But being vertically integrated means they don't have to share with others, and the total profit off of iPhones/iPads can offset the higher costs involved in developing and fabbing the A-series SoCs. However Intel doesn't have that luxury, and Asus would never let Intel have all of the profit.

Smartphone SoCs are a race to the bottom. And Intel as a business has nothing to gain from taking part in that race. The winner is the guy who got badly hurt but didn't die; a Pyrrhic victory."

PCs were also a race to the bottom. I wonder what would happen if Intel or AMD bought Compaq or another PC manufacturer maybe in the 1990s and dominated the PC market by the mid-2000s.

Intel probably wouldn't have been able to sustain the DNA required to also be successful in that market, and they would have had severe antitrust problems. AMD would have had the same first problem (but probably worse since they've historically had much poorer management), and would have likely lost a lot of their business selling to other PC manufacturers they'd now be directly competing with.

So why haven't we seen the same story apply for the chromebook market(which btw is 10% of laptops) ? It has open and fair competition between Atoms and Arm's.

10% of laptops where?

Beside the HN quotes that everyone in US is using them, I never saw a single person using a Chromebook in Europe.

Surely I see them on display in German stores, usually just one, being down priced every week until it finally sells. Take a couple of months and another one eventually shows up again on the same display spot.

On the street, trains, coffeshops, airports, never spotted one.

They're said to have a big fraction of the US K-12 education market, where Chrome OS is a good fit, and they're cheaper than full service x86 laptops and much cheaper than Apple laptops.

Sure, they're "said to". But is there a reliable figure somewhere about usage share of that segment?

but this happens time and time again in business, where business's are so afraid to cannibalize their own products that they miss the next big wave.

Nokia's biggest mistake was embracing Android. They had a killer OS with MeeGo, running on a flagship phone, the N9. It could've toppled Android at the time, but sadly, management smarts weren't equal to those of their engineers.

So perhaps Intel is in the process of making an analogous mistake...

Nokia's biggest mistake were the internal politics between Symbian, Maemo and to MeeGo transition (Gtk -> Qt).

When the first Maemo prototypes were shown to us, many asked why a radio modem wasn't part of it.