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Five Years After Apple Broke Up With Intel, Intel is Begging for Money
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5 years ago I was kinda happy that “yay Apple Silicon will kill Intel”, and 7 years ago I was enthusiastic about such idea. Partly due to Intel’s overpriced options and wholesale-centered business model. But now it seems kinda sad that this giant is about to go bancrupt. After all, people would lose their jobs, it would be an economic hit, as well as Chinese manufacturers will likely take this niche. Lets hope someone saves Intel for good
Steve Jobs managed to save Apple from bankruptcy when he came back in 1997. Don't you think that a capable leader could do the same for Intel?
"Intel ended up exiting the modem chip business, and selling its modem business to Apple."
This is the key line in the story.
This is the key line in the story.
Intel is a nothing company nowadays and the board of directors should wind up the business and return equity to the shareholders. It's dead, Jim.
A nothing business? What exactly are the millions of companies around the world going to suddenly switch to? Apple has little to no enterprise offerings, a ton of software is x86 and Windows only, etc.
Apple apparently are using an "in house" only version of their own silicon for iCloud data-centers. No need for Xeons.
Instead of propping up Intel, how about a special dividend to us shareholders, if you can't find something to do with that $100 Billion cash hoard. It's my money, and I'd like some of it. Rather than spending $100 Billion on a car and then giving up. Or making a headset that no one is buying.
Apple should see Intel's story as a lesson.
Intel has been the household brand for computing chips, from Pentium to the current ones. They slept on their laurels, didn't innovate fast enough, and now see where they are.
Apple needs to push the throttle on innovation, or it's going to happen the same...
Intel has been the household brand for computing chips, from Pentium to the current ones. They slept on their laurels, didn't innovate fast enough, and now see where they are.
Apple needs to push the throttle on innovation, or it's going to happen the same...
Heady dose of editorial freedom in this headline...
Intel isn't in great shape, but 'begging' might be a step too far.
Intel isn't in great shape, but 'begging' might be a step too far.
I think they are doing fine on hardware, it is software that Cook has no idea what he is doing. Lack of software innovation is dragging Apple down.
Apple seems to think that creating an App is a one time thing. It is not. Apple needs to quit creating Apps and focus its software resources on the operating systems and related utilities and let its third party developers develop and support the Apps.
I think Apple wants to see if Intel can manufacture 2 nm process A-Series SoC's starting with the A20 model. If Intel succeeds it could mean a second source for the A20, especially given the location of TSMC's foundries in Taiwan and its vulnerability to military attack from China.
AMD makes x86 CPUs. Windows is finally starting to support ARM. There are still options.
Intel sat on its laurels too long and is paying the price. They got too fixated on the gamer market where power consumption doesn't matter, then they got beat there too.
One example from my own experience, the i5-4570R CPU from 2014 has better onboard graphics than the i7-8700 from 2018. Four years and they did nothing. Intel's thinking was that if you need to do more than display a spreadsheet get a graphics card. They ignored the whole middle ground which was great for Nvidia.
Power consumption was their other problem. After getting Apple's business by promising performance per watt they stopped caring. Marketing didn't help either, A dual core i7? Really? A dual core with hyper threading is an i3 and should have been marketed as such.
My Linux box is running an AMD Ryzen 4600G which has decent built-in graphics and M1 level performance. It came out in 2020. It's one node behind so uses more power (65 W max) than the M1 which is fine on the desktop. It is not a space heater like the Intel equivalent CPU (also 65 W) PLUS the graphics card would be. It's hard to find a graphics card that uses less than 75 watts, and most are around 150.
The market will decide. Mergers also create monopolies, and we have plenty of those going around.
Apple has no obligation to bail out Intel.
Intel had nothing but empty promises for all the years Apple used Intel processors. Intel could not innovate in a timely fashion which delayed Apple's products for years.
Good riddance as far as being a viable vendor to Apple. Intel will just be another Kodak like failure.
Intel had nothing but empty promises for all the years Apple used Intel processors. Intel could not innovate in a timely fashion which delayed Apple's products for years.
Good riddance as far as being a viable vendor to Apple. Intel will just be another Kodak like failure.
And the result of those is a far worse situation of consumers. Which is why anti-trust laws exist.
I mean, I believe it. At the time, Flash was a behemoth. It seemed crazy to have a new computing platform that intentionally rejected it. Of course, that makes Jobs' refusal all the more brilliant. Nobody get's praise for making obvious calls, and that's why Steve looks like a wizard in this case. All those other technologies were on the distant horizon, but if it weren't for the iPhone ignoring Flash altogether, then they may have taken much longer to push Flash off of the web.
I know the headphone jack is still a touchy subject for some people, but Tim shows flashes of Steve’s instincts from time to time. Wired headphones have their benefits, of course. But I think that most people would agree that the wireless earbuds on the market today are a lot more convenient for everyday use. And they’re affordable too, you can get a decent pair of wireless earbuds on Amazon for around $30.
The problem is those laws are weak and handicapped. Which is why we’ve ended up with so many monopolies through mergers.
Intel is a prime example why you don't let bean counters run your product pipeline, let the engineers lead the way. Intel sat on their haunches, trickling releases because they're the "industry standard", they lost many engineers to competing companies because those engineers wanted to work on the cool new tech, and then those companies utterly leapfrogged intel in terms of performance.
I'll never forget my jaw dropping when I upgraded from a 16 inch MacBook Pro i9 with top of the line graphics card and 64 gigs of ram to an M2 MacBook Air with 16 gigs of ram...and saw the Air outperform it in every single way.
I'll never forget my jaw dropping when I upgraded from a 16 inch MacBook Pro i9 with top of the line graphics card and 64 gigs of ram to an M2 MacBook Air with 16 gigs of ram...and saw the Air outperform it in every single way.
Being able to dual boot windows was a huge reason the Mac had such big success in those years. It helped break the monopoly Microsoft held
Switching to ARM wouldn’t have done that and it would’ve resulted in a smaller success