Source: Intel has eliminated its wearables division, which made the Basis smartwatch, and the company's New Technologies Group now focuses on AR
- Intel laid off about 80 percent of the team that made the Basis smartwatch in November, and has now eliminated the division entirely, a person familiar tells CNBC.
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel's exit from wearables was a two-step retreat: sources reported large-scale layoffs in the New Devices Group in November 2016, and months earlier the company had recalled the Basis Peak over an overheating burn hazard and killed its cloud service. This report closes the loop — the division that made the Basis smartwatch is gone entirely.
What remains of Intel's new-devices ambition sits in the New Technologies Group, now pointed at augmented reality. But even that bet was already being shopped: Bloomberg reported in early 2018 that Intel sought to sell a majority stake in its AR unit for as much as $350M, so the 'AR focus' is itself a candidate for divestiture rather than a committed platform.
First-order effects
- The Basis smartwatch product line and its team are terminated outright; the roughly 80 percent cut reported in late 2016 becomes a full shutdown of the division.
- Surviving new-devices staff are consolidated under the New Technologies Group with AR as the sole stated priority.
Second-order effects
- Intel's AR push now carries the full weight of the company's non-core hardware ambitions alone — yet with a majority stake already on the market, partners and buyers face a unit whose owner is signaling it would rather sell than scale it.
- Wearables component and manufacturing suppliers tied to Basis lose an anchor customer, reinforcing that Intel's volume orders in consumer devices are unreliable.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across this coverage — Basis wound down, the devices group later shut entirely, RealSense eventually 'wound down' too — points to Intel structurally refusing to be a consumer-hardware company, keeping only sensor-adjacent bets it can monetize through OEMs.
- If chipmakers keep treating new-device categories as experiments to be exited at the first recall or margin miss, wearable makers should not count on Intel-class silicon partners for durable category investment.
The trend: Large semiconductor companies keep entering consumer device categories and exiting them within a few years, retreating to chips and components while shopping the hardware units they built.