[magicloop]

The proposal was unstable on both sides in fact. Jobs didn't fully appreciate the importance of power efficiency at the time - an internal team scrambled to demonstrate why Intel would have been a non-starter due to power budget. There were also ecosystem issues, since gearing up for an embedded device at that time mostly meant choosing ARM architecture for that complexity tier they were engineering.

So a deal based on any price wasn't a realistic avenue for iPhone. The fact that Intel was actually considered was itself a radical move on behalf of Steve (absent the technical obstacles that emerged later).