It's really incredible how much Intel fumbled their technology lead. They had some of the most advanced R&D in many fields including AI, Ray Tracing, Glass Substrates, Fiber Optics... and just never managed to turn that leadership R&D into a leadership product.
So, one of the problems I seen in most of the discussions is that everyone is trying to tell a technology story (because you find that interesting, and it is) when you need to learn to tell an economic story. One of the reasons why Apple is quite successful here is that they are not a technology company. They are a go-to-market company. They identify a customer need, they identify how they can solve it, how they will market that solution, then they invent the technology needed to implement that solution and then they sell it. They identify the potential demand, then they create that demand, then they satisfy that demand.
Intel had no go-to-market strategy for the AI or the ray tracing or the fiber optics. You look at an Intel tech like Thunderbolt, Apple
carried that. It would have died in the lab if Apple didn't commit to putting it in products to solve problems their market was looking at. Between Intel and their customers are a whole field of players that Intel has no control over. Intel didn't want to make PCs, so Thunderbolt largely withered in the PC space. Same goes for fiber optics and ray tracing and AI even though those are big categories, Intel couldn't get into the category in an economically meaningful way.
I think one of the problems Intel always had was that they were aspirationally modeling off of companies like the old HP that were technological pioneers in the valley. But HP
made things. I spent years working with a 1970s HP-1000, and HP oscilloscopes and all kinds of stuff. In the old days they didn't avoid the messy step of turning it into a product, but Intel was sort of founded with the idea of 'what if we just skipped that messy part'. And yeah, it works, but you lose a LOT of control in the goal of being a technology leader because you have no ability to put it in a customer's hands and give them a competitive advantage or whatever so that a demand market can form around the tech. Sure, a lot of it comes because of alignments in the interests of the OEMs and Intel, but when that space runs toward price competition because the OEMs don't have different versions of Windows to ship and the Intel/AMD SKU price sheet is sufficiently well calibrated that there's no real competitive benefit other than cost, then nobody is really championing your tech because their success is coming from saving pennies, not solving problems and that pioneering tech is designed to solve problems. Meanwhile Apple is over there refusing against all analyst insistence on competing on price and focusing on solving problems and building up tech behind that task, and so Thunderbolt gets developed and Apple runs with it because it's useful and the PC world is still coloring their USB ports because they don't want to pay the $0.03 to make them all good ones. There's no room for Thunderbolt in that space and Intel is trapped to the whims of the OEMs. The OEMs don't want Thunderbolt, they want a USB-2 to be marginally cheaper, and Intel has no room to make the case for Thunderbolt - so Apple does it.
You can argue that Intel should have become more of a product company like HP or Apple, but I don't think they actually had the capacity to do that for the same reason that Google so routinely fails on the same front - that's just not how they're wired, and we've just watched Intel try and wire itself for 10 years, unsuccessfully. It's hard. Most companies go bankrupt before they get there. Apple themselves very nearly did as well.
The only thing I think Intel fumbled was investing in that stuff in the first place when they had insufficient control over whether they could turn it into a product (I'd make an exception for glass substrate - that was much more in their wheelhouse). I think they needed to pick a lane - either act like AMD and build only to customer demand, or be innovative and have a product division.
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
Jobs isn't saying that the idea they reject isn't good - he's admitting that it is. But it's not enough that out there might be a customer who wants it - he's saying "It's not useful to us if we can't walk it from the lab into a customers hands and collect that payment." And Intel wasn't able to do that and I'm willing to bet that nobody could put down a business model for how Intel was going to put ray tracing into people's hands and collect money for it.