Intel was actually subsidizing smartphone vendors who wanted to use Intel chips. Unluckily hardly any smartphone vendor wanted to react to this offer (except some small experiments like the mentioned ASUS ZenFone 2).
> In high school I did the lowest tier maths and then jumped in the deep end by doing a year of electrical engineering. I’ve now done those harder math classes but I feel like there’s holes here and there. I think when I took physics it really brought out these flaws and lack of intuition.
As a mathematician, I say: what you lack is not math intuition, but math knowledge. Read really hard math textbooks and solve exercises. This is the only way known to me to get better at math.
> Would you really say just a blunt "no", or would you provide some context as to why?
This reminds me of some party of math students. One math student (clearly not on the spectrum!) X asked another math student Y: "Do you know whether Z will come?". Y answered: "Yes, he will come, but later.", to which X answered: "I didn't want to know whether Z will come, but only whether you have the knowledge whether he will come. If I wanted to know from you whether Z will come, I would have asked you 'Will Z also come?' and in the worst case gotten the answer from you that you don't know. But this is not the question that I asked. So, you should immediatelly have concluded that I am not interested whether Z will come, but only in whether you have the knowledge about that.".
I could tell lots of such stories about such ultra-precise questions and expecting precise answers among math students.
> The idea is that a notable thing must have been written by a high-status and well-credentialed person, and could not have been done by a talented no-name.
I think your reasoning is interesting. Nevertheless consider that if we hunt for SN, it is very likely that it is at least a person who knows more than a little bit about various topics that were necessary to implement Bitcoin (e.g. finance, cryptographic hashed data structures, existing protocols for crypto cash, ...). I agree that it is quite possible that this could also be a talented no-name, but I think this property provides a strong criterion to check if someone claimed that some specific person (who is a talented non-name) they have in mind is SN.
Also one would have to provide an explanation why such a person is not more well-known. It can be that he/she has a difficult personality. It can also be that he/she lives in a country where such a person will have a lot less opportunities etc. But these constraint again limits the circle of talented no-names that could be SN.
TLDR: Your reasoning is interesting, but your hypothesis has strong consequences.
His death 2013 fits well with the public disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto. Also Dave Kleiman worked in computer forensics and was from very early on involved in the Bitcoin community.
It is well-known that Dave Kleiman and the "self-claimed Satoshi Nakamoto" Craig Steven Wright knew each other (Craig Steven Wright claimed that they collaborated when creating Bitcoin). Also the fact that Craig Steven Wright could convince people that are deeply involved in the Bitcoin community in a one-on-one interview that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, provides strong evidence that Craig Steven Wright knew lots of obscure things about Satoshi Nakamoto "that only Satoshi Nakamoto should be able to know". If he knew this information from Dave Kleinman, this can be plausibly explained.
> Maybe it's a huge team, so there are multiple individual signatures and it's tough to track down heterogenous signatures.
In this case I would expect that we see a multitude of code styles in the source code of the very first publicly released version of the Bitcoin client. But I think nobody has yet pointed this out. This to me at least implies that if there were multiple programmers involved, there was at least someone who "ironed over" the complete source code to make the code style much more homogenous. But under this hypothesis we would expect that the code was audited at least somewhat thoroughly. But in fact the first versions of the Bitcoin client were rather "put together hastily" and contained lots of bugs that were fixed afterwards. Look for example at the following comment:
So first versions of the Bitcoin client rather look to me like some solo person who can program, but at least whose job is not to program in C++ every day, put together an experiment (the Bitcoin client) hastily.
Now let us assume that there was a huge team behind, but only 1-2 (at most 3) programmers with very similar code signatures. But of course the other team members also had things to do (to be worth their salary), like working out the math etc. But if it were a huge team that contains people of such special skills, why the hell did they hire such a bad programmer to implement it?
In this sense I believe there is strong evidence to drop the "huge team hypothesis".
Good for whom? "Good for the user" does not mean "good for Reddit".