Steve Jobs had Intel in mind for iPad

Steve Jobs high profile biography reveals a lot of interesting information and one which has surfaced is based around the use of Intel chips in the original iPad. Walter Isaacson revealed that Jobs considered using the Intel Atom in the first iPad.

Jobs faced some counter arguments from Tony Fadell, the guy who helped create the iPod. He believed that Apple should use a processor based on ARM architecture.

Jobs said “At the high-performance end, Intel is the best. At the beginning, we were doing wonderful things together. They wanted this big joint project to do chips for future iPhones.”

Jobs ended up losing the argument with Fadell and Apple went ahead and bought a few chip companies and made their own designs, the A4 and later the A5.

Jobs explains in the book why he didnt opt for Intel in the iPad and iPhone “There were two reasons we did not go with them. One was that they are just really slow. They are like a steamship, not very flexible. We are used to going pretty fast. Second is that we just did not want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.”

He added that Intel's graphics ‘suck' and that Apple's own A4 and A5 designs have very efficient system on a chip designs. Intel CEO Paul Otellini spoke out about the iPad saying that they couldn't agree on pricing for the iPad implementations and because Jobs wanted too much control over the iPad chip.

Kitguru says: A good source of revenue for Intel, missed.

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