Sources: Intel to shut down its New Devices Group, which was formed in 2013 and made fitness trackers and smart glasses
Intel's long-failing foray into wearables and augmented reality is officially dead. — The chip giant's new devices group will shut down, according to people familiar with the situation.
Context & Ripple Effects
The shutdown closes a five-year retreat that unfolded in stages: large-scale New Devices Group layoffs surfaced in late 2016, then Intel eliminated the Basis smartwatch team in mid-2017 while folding the survivors into a New Technologies Group refocused on augmented reality. Along the way it discontinued the Edison, Joule, and Galileo compute modules and the Recon Jet eyewear line, stripping away the building blocks those devices depended on.
What changed this week is that the exit became total. In February, Bloomberg reported Intel was shopping a majority stake in its AR business for as much as $350M — an attempt to salvage value from the unit. Shutting New Devices Group down outright ends even that path, leaving no internal home for the fitness-tracker and smart-glasses work begun in 2013.
First-order effects
- New Devices Group employees face shutdown on top of the 2016 layoff rounds, and the AR unit Bloomberg said Intel wanted up to $350M for now has no parent group left to sell it from.
- Intel's remaining device ambitions consolidate under the New Technologies Group's AR focus, with the consumer wearable products — Basis watches, fitness trackers — fully retired rather than transitioned.
Second-order effects
- Suppliers and software partners built around Recon Jet eyewear and the Edison/Joule/Galileo modules lose their anchor customer entirely, since the modules were discontinued last year and the group behind them now disappears.
- Rivals still selling smart glasses and enterprise wearables face one fewer deep-pocketed chipmaker subsidizing the category, tightening the field to players who can fund devices without a core silicon business cross-subsidizing them.
Third-order effects
- The pattern repeats later in the corpus — Intel wound down RealSense in 2021 — suggesting a durable structure in which Intel culls non-core hardware businesses whenever they fail to reach scale, concentrating capital and talent on silicon.
- For the broader industry, each Intel exit shifts device-hardware experimentation toward companies whose core business is the device itself, raising the bar for how quickly wearables and AR units must show standalone economics.
The trend: Intel has spent a decade serially shutting down device-hardware side bets — wearables, compute modules, computer-vision cameras — to refocus on its core chip business.