At the time of discussion with Intel, it was not an explicit phone project, it was _A_ Apple project. Over the years, Apple spent millions on projects to disrupt some markets which either didn't materialize at all or ended up not disruptive/competitive in the market.

There are countless examples of this. Some Moonshot where Apple thought they knew better what the market want to just figure out that it doesn't work.

The project Steve Jobs was talking about could as well have been one of THOSE projects, and Apple tried to get a established and well-working component at a price which would potentially destroy Intels business with its other customers.

> but as CEO of intel, he failed miserably from not putting more effort into the decision making.

But who said that he didn't put effort in the decision making? According to Otellini himself Apple was demanding a price lower than Intel's COST.

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.

Feature phones were already outpacing PC growth by then and Intel decided to snub the market. Canceling XScale was a truly stupid decision.

Intel tried to corner that market by deviating from ARM with their custom MMX architecture. It worked with Windows PocketPC as a OS-supplier, but HW-vendors with their own OS didn't want to limit their supply-chain to a single CPU-platform.

But yes, their belief in x86 being superior surely clouded their judgement on XScale's future potential

There's still phones made these days with physical keyboards if you truly value the feature.

https://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=1362

With that in mind, you can see how someone might look at it and say "ok Apple isn't that serious about phones"

But I'd bet what actually happened was Steve Jobs used one and said "this thing sucks, throw more money at our iPhone project"

iPhone was predictably huge, but I don’t think it was a sure thing it would be this huge. And Intel’s finance-driven culture probably did the math and decided it was better to pass because of the uncertainty. Finance hates uncertainty.

At that time, it could as well have been Apple's attempt to a build an Apple TV (which never materialized), a Set-Top-Box (which was reworked for years to then end up as a iPhone-in-a-box AppleTV), a Premium Wi-Fi network, a game console,...

This is what monopolies do, it breeds laziness in the good days, and as a company backslides on the morass of apathetic incompetent mbas that settled into their middle management Machiavelli fiefdoms, it becomes a clinging game to make retirement before layoff