At the time, Intel believed the mobile phone processor market was too small to justify the immense R&D investment required to deliver on Apple's request. Designing chips is an incredibly costly endeavor, and Intel assumed that the volumes wouldn't be large enough to cover those costs. In hindsight, this decision would go down as one of the biggest missed opportunities in business history. Otellini later admitted that Intel had drastically miscalculated, underestimating potential demand by 100x.

Admittedly this one is funny given the "Intel lifecycle" as my colleagues who are Intel alumni put it: acquire a company for a mountain of cash (much more than it'd cost to develop an SoC back in 2000s) only to fumble its potential. And the current CEO might be continuing this lunacy if rumors about AI startup acquisition are true.