Intel Will No Longer Make Wearables

While companies like Huawei, Xiaomi and others keep churning out wearables regularly for the low-end market, the demise of larger partners might just tell a lot about the state of the market.

The latest such news comes out of the Intel camp, where the market has been decided to be lacking potential.

According to CNBC, the company laid off 80-percent of the workforce in the wearables department around November, with the remaining mostly reallocated elsewhere within the organization. The report doesn’t surprise, as TechCrunch had predicted Intel’s departure from the market around that time. The department ceased to exist altogether around two weeks ago.

High End Smartwatches

Intel had previously announced the premium Connected Modular 45 smartwatch with Tag Heuer, costing $1550. It couldn’t have hoped to achieve mainstream status with it, though, supplementing it with headphones, sunglasses and other wearables.

It had even acquired the team behind the Basis smartwatch back in 2014, which was around the time that Intel’s investments in the industry heated up. So much so, that Intel spent $100 million acquiring the team. The dividends have hardly arrived, with the company having to spend millions due to safety risks.

Obsolescence

Since then, the division has ceased to remain important, failing to appear in the company’s earnings calls, too. You can still find the Curie chipset used in its wearables being advertised on Intel’s website, though, along with some of the smartwatches it has announced in recent times.

Intel is pretty active in other segments of the market, including its investments in RealSense, mixed reality, AI and the car market, leaving the wearables column as an outlier. We might hear more about the matter in the company’s next earnings call in a week’s time, though, it hardly leaves any doubts considering the slowing state of the market.