No-one wants to run PC apps on tablets or smartphones. The way you design an app for these form factors is completely different. For starters, you target the installed base which is mostly iOS or Android running ARM. It's going to be very difficult to suddenly change the installed base.
Apple just needs to make their products incrementally better to stay in business which they are slotted to do without needing to change their underlying microprocessor.
No
You hit the nail on the head: the profits are what is difficult, not revenue.
Apple is likely tweaking their own Swift core for 16nm FinFET on TSMC. It's a lot cheaper to design your own CPU and get it fabricated than to buy one from Intel and their last design was class-leading in power/performance so they're likely not losing out on specs by going in-house.
ARM is strongly rooted in mobile and at the low power end of the microprocessor market. That means its got all its weight on on foot in the paint and it can pivot from here if needed. Intel will likely challenge it in low power, but it can equally make inroads at the higher power end of the market. It's not going away anytime soon. It's staying power is what gives Intel nightmares. None of Intel's previous competitors had this vantage point when looking at Intel.
As a company, Intel has a lousy bureaucratic engineering process whereas ARM has one of the best. They also attract the best engineers which Intel no longer does. I would bet on ARM to deliver the innovation.
Ultra-mobile = Intel BS headed nowhere outside.
"Ultra"-Mobile?
That's probably because I'm Indian. In fact Khitchdee is a popular Indian dish made using rice and lentils cooked together in a pot. See Wikipedia.
There's no future in mobile for this company.
Without growth in Android tablets, they need cannibalization of Android tablets and iPads by hybrids. Morgan Stanley is not betting on that.
They noted that Intel faces a chicken and egg problem where app developers for (Android) tablets only develop for the installed base of computing power. That is controlled by the high volume ARM processors. For Intel to make a dent in the market, new apps have to be written that make use of the extra performance Intel chips offer, but those wont be written until after Intel makes a dent in the market.
From CNET:
"Samsung took home almost all of the profits generated in the Android smartphone world last quarter, according to a report out today from Strategy Analytics.
For the first quarter, global Android smartphone profits totaled $5.3 billion. Samsung captured a hefty 95 percent, or $5.1 billion, of that amount. Strategy Analytics senior analyst Woody Oh pinned Samsung's success on an "efficient supply chain, sleek products, and crisp marketing."
Second place LG Electronics snagged 2.5 percent of Android's global earnings and is far behind Samsung in the volume of its smartphone devices. Samsung could even use its dominance to gain an edge over LG and other rival Android vendors."
Google/Moto, ZTE and Lenovo, all predominantly Android are apparently not making any profit.
Win8 Haswell tabs will have trouble competing with the iPad, a 4th gen category defining product. If they cant compete with it, they will be relegated to low volume also rans like most of the other tabs in the market. There's very little hope here.
My point was Intel has flaky customers
It's ZTE or Lenovo?
It is rumored that Google has pulled back support for Moto's XPhone project. Google/Moto is Intel's most high profile endorser in the mobile space. Most analysts view the acquisition as a defensive patent play and don't see Google getting behind Moto's products too much as was the general market perception earlier.
Intel's business model cant sustain low cost high volume computing that's setting in at the low end of the computing market. The other aspect is open customisation that you get with ARM for which they have no answer. Their vertically integrated but they don't have the best products outside chips for PCs.
Intel doesn't face a threat from ARM. The mobile chip market is small compared to the huge PC chip market. Intel faces a threat from consumers choosing not to buy PCs and therefore net expenditure per person on computing resources going down a lot. Intel has always counted on that to grow and now for the first time it's started shrinking. This has thrown off its projections and brought into question its huge capital outlay for the future when growth in "cash cow" sectors is not a given.
Performance advantage will not be enough (as a selling point)