Sources: Intel planning large number of layoffs in New Devices Group, its wearables division
According to sources close to the company, Intel is about to step back from wearables in a big way. — In 2014, the company purchased Basis, a little-known producer of some truly excellent fitness watches.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-arc. Months after sources reported Intel was planning 2016 job cuts significantly larger than the prior year's 1,100, the reductions now have a named target: New Devices Group, the wearables division built around Basis, the fitness-watch maker Intel acquired in 2014.
What follows in the related coverage shows this was not a one-time trim but the first stage of an exit — by mid-2017 Intel had eliminated the wearables division outright, with its New Technologies Group refocused on AR, and by 2018 the remaining New Devices Group was slated for full shutdown.
First-order effects
- A large share of New Devices Group employees face layoffs, and the Basis smartwatch line Intel paid for in 2014 loses its internal backing almost overnight.
- Intel's consumer-wearables hardware effort effectively goes into wind-down mode while the cuts are still officially just 'planned.'
Second-order effects
- Resources and headcount freed by the retreat get redirected toward bets Intel rates as closer to strategic value — the same restructuring wave that ended with the successor group pivoting to augmented reality rather than wrist-worn devices.
- Rivals still selling fitness trackers lose a deep-pocketed chipmaker as a competitor, tightening a consumer market Intel had entered only two years earlier.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held beyond wearables: the division was fully shut down by 2018, and Intel returned to thousand-scale layoffs in 2022 — evidence that big-chip companies treat consumer-device experiments as cyclical, disposable bets rather than durable businesses.
- For hardware startups like Basis, acquisition by a giant silicon vendor emerges as an endpoint, not a growth platform: the brand survives the deal far longer than the product line does.
The trend: Intel's recurring waves of large-scale cost-cutting keep narrowing its ambitions beyond core chips, with consumer-device side bets like wearables the first casualties each cycle.