Early signs of Intel trouble?

[bniu]

Before the Skylake mess, I remember the Sandy Bridge MBPs were incredible but they somehow lacked usb 3 because of Intel’s chipset being slow to support usb 3, then early 2015, the 13” MBP shipped with Broadwell, but the 15” MBP was delayed and then eventually shipped with the force trackpad but with refreshed Haswell chips instead.

This all seemed to lead to the Skylake mess where Apple was prevented from 32GB of ram in the 15” model, and Intel still can’t support LPDDR4, still can’t support WiFi 6, etc.
Also intel’s underwhelming performance on the modem front seemed to be the primary reason why our iPhone 11’s lack 5G. Also the Intel LTE modems were somewhat inferior

Seemed like the troubles started in the early part of the decade only to manifest now into a full blown breakup?

what’s been going on at Intel from going from a tech company that can do no wrong to basically fumbling everything these days?

 

[ctjack]

I remember the Sandy Bridge MBPs were incredible but they somehow lacked usb 3 because of Intel’s chipset being slow to support usb 3,

I remember that my 06/2011 Dell Xps 15z had both usb 3(blue slot) and usb 2.0 at the same time on Sandy Bridge CPUs from Intel.

and Intel still can’t support LPDDR4, still can’t support WiFi 6, etc.

Wi-fi 6 is included everywhere on Win laptops with intel inside.

Seemed like the troubles started in the early part of the decade only to manifest now into a full blown breakup?

There is no trouble per se. But only wish of Apple to make more money out of it.
Imagine that you are a company director, who is building houses for people. So you have workers and skills, but you rent trucks, bulldozers and buy materials to build the house. So you left with little money only for labor.
But imagine, if somehow you had your own trucks, bulldozers and even had a factory making concrete and steel.
So now all of the money paid stays in your pocket.

They just want to switch for more money into their pocket + eventually we will be tied up to Mac app store only. So no 3rd party apps if not presented in App store.
Kinda great wish of Apple of all the times - to make consumers handcuffed as much as possible.
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All of the problems you mentioned is not a problem of Intel - it is a problem of Apple being greedy as always.

 

[leman]

but the 15” MBP was delayed

The 15" was delayed because Apple wanted to use high-powered Intel iGPUs, which Intel was not able or willing to deliver in bulk. Which led Apple to scrap the iGPU route for the 15" model and re-introduce mandatory dGPU.

This all seemed to lead to the Skylake mess where Apple was prevented from 32GB of ram in the 15” model, and Intel still can’t support LPDDR4, still can’t support WiFi 6, etc.

They do, but only in their never chipsets. Their higher-power platform is still Skylake-based.

 

[Janichsan]

... Intel still can’t support LPDDR4,...

The current Ice Lake CPUs, found for instance in the current Macbook Air, support LPDDR4X.

 

[Audit13]

The same thing can be said of many companies, Apple included.

 

[JPack]

If you're old enough, you'll realize Intel goes through these cycles every few decades.

Intel becomes complacent, the competition intensifies, then Intel puts their head down and comes back on top.

The issues aren't engineering ones, but rather management and leadership related.