Intel Launches Heavily Biased 'PC vs. Mac' Comparison Website

[SuperMatt]

I will never ever forgive Tim Cook for this unconscionable move. I was born in 1990 and had been on Windows computers left and right for 20 years until my friend gave me his Macbook Pro in 2010. I was rejoicing at the inherent Boot Camp and high-app-compatibility. I will never ever forgive him ever. We all know that Mr. Cook came from the IBM company, and he will outsource everything while discarding the needs of the customer in real time. I am so angry.

I’m confused. You were born in 1990 and used computers for 20 years up until 2010. So you used computers as an infant? You should also realize that Intel chips in Macs was just one phase of Macs. They started with the 680x0 processors (1984-94), then switched to PowerPC(1994-2006), then to Intel(2006-present), and now to chips designed by Apple.

So even if you only used Macs from 1990-2010, you would have gone through 3 different chip architectures.

Boot camp was a feature many people liked, but with so many apps available for Macs now, and the speed and efficiency gains of Apple Silicon, I think most customers are quite happy with this change. And those who aren’t? Well, you can still buy an Intel Mac today if you want. Not sure this switch is worth holding a lifetime grudge over.

 

[portland-dude]

Also PC gaming is suffering at the moment. Pre built systems are adding 4-8 additional weeks. You can’t find a reasonably priced GPU except the 1050.

I was floored to see the mid range Radeon I picked up for $199 a few months ago (eGPU for use with a Mac mini and security spy) was up to $800 just the other day. What in the world...

 

[Maximara]

I will never ever forgive Tim Cook for this unconscionable move. I was born in 1990 and had been on Windows computers left and right for 20 years until my friend gave me his Macbook Pro in 2010. I was rejoicing at the inherent Boot Camp and high-app-compatibility. I will never ever forgive him ever. We all know that Mr. Cook came from the IBM company, and he will outsource everything while discarding the needs of the customer in real time. I am so angry.

You do know that the only reason Windows on ARM is so limited on the Mac is due to licensing, right? Intel has demonstrated that they have sat on their laurels too long and way behind the curve. The only thing keeping AMD from cleaning Intel's clock and asking the time is production and inertia. Apple has shown that with the right translation software ARM can trounce Intel on a performance/watt which will become important as energy conservation starts ramping up again.

 

[Isamilis]

I’m out of the loop on a lot of this, but shouldn’t Intel be more worried about AMD than Apple?

M1 made intel much bigger loss than AMD. Such an irony of the declining company.

 

[deevey]

I will never ever forgive Tim Cook for this unconscionable move. I was born in 1990 and had been on Windows computers left and right for 20 years until my friend gave me his Macbook Pro in 2010. I was rejoicing at the inherent Boot Camp and high-app-compatibility. I will never ever forgive him ever. We all know that Mr. Cook came from the IBM company, and he will outsource everything while discarding the needs of the customer in real time. I am so angry.

So you think we should be stuck with slower, more power hungry and hotter CPU's forever ?

You do realize that this is the kick in the nuts that Microsoft probably needs to fast-track the modernization of your beloved Windows for the future.

You would never have forgave Steve Jobs either. But without major "upsetting" decisions like these you would still be using floppy drives and serial ports.

 

[hot-gril]

I will never ever forgive Tim Cook for this unconscionable move. I was born in 1990 and had been on Windows computers left and right for 20 years until my friend gave me his Macbook Pro in 2010. I was rejoicing at the inherent Boot Camp and high-app-compatibility. I will never ever forgive him ever. We all know that Mr. Cook came from the IBM company, and he will outsource everything while discarding the needs of the customer in real time. I am so angry.

Well you missed the oldstuff->PPC transition of the 90s and the PPC->Intel transition of 2006 if your first Mac was 2010.

 

[Mac... nificent]

And yet, with all of intels whining, they still have never shown that any of their processors are better than the M1.

... just desperate and petty ads.

 

[cmaier]

Companies do not just care just about percentages. Why do you think companies spend millions of dollars on a high-end product when they know they are going to sell just a few? It's because it shows their prospective customers what they are capable of, and it influences prospective customers (and even other companies) to buy their lower-priced products. For example, Ford spent millions designing and building their Ford GT, when they knew they would only sell a relatively few of them. However, it showed off their technology and influenced customers to buy their lower-priced products, which is where the company will then make their money over their competition.

You have gone so far off track you can’t see your original point from here. Your point was somehow that these companies are driven by those products. They are not. Do you think Ford is driven by the GT? Nope.

 

[cmaier]

I will never ever forgive Tim Cook for this unconscionable move. I was born in 1990 and had been on Windows computers left and right for 20 years until my friend gave me his Macbook Pro in 2010. I was rejoicing at the inherent Boot Camp and high-app-compatibility. I will never ever forgive him ever. We all know that Mr. Cook came from the IBM company, and he will outsource everything while discarding the needs of the customer in real time. I am so angry.

If he’s ”discarding the needs of the customers” then how come Apple has several orders of magnitude more customers today than they did back before he was in charge?

He may be discarding YOUR needs, but your needs may be weird.

 

[Phil B]

I really can’t explain why but for some reason, rather than making me want to buy Intel product because of their merit I just come away feeling sorry for the company. It’s totally absurd.

To be honest, thought about about buying the "last" Intel iMac ever, and pretty sure, that the I or i9 will doamgreat job. Nutpretty close not toto I, for this stupid fight again: Have seen it so manag time in my Apple Times since eqaryk 0ßies, and know what? I'm still with a Mac, but I'd never been still with an "Intel", jus to be the brain inside. Guys, like this your farewell ist kind of sa after a brilliant coworker with Apple. But to be honest, there was no real news about you the last year. Typing this on an "old" late 13 iMad,, and it still a little beast. But not for running an Intel inside only. ;-) Damned, could have ended better.

 

[Phil B]

I don't see that comparison as heavily biased. Except for the multi monitor support(which will be enabled for apple silicon MacBook pros), all the other points are legitimately true.

It is exactly like the original Mac vs PC campaign by Apple. Apple highlighted their strengths while not mentioning their weaknesses. Intel is doing the same

The one, only and old fight hehehe... And to be honest, as an old Macboy that I am: Ain*t it somehow funny, that this show starts again...? Come one, dudes, agree?
hahahaha ;-)

 

[Andropov]

I don't see that comparison as heavily biased. Except for the multi monitor support(which will be enabled for apple silicon MacBook pros), all the other points are legitimately true.

It is exactly like the original Mac vs PC campaign by Apple. Apple highlighted their strengths while not mentioning their weaknesses. Intel is doing the same

Key difference between the campaigns is that Intel doesn't sell laptops. Had Dell, for instance, made this ads, it would be perfectly logical. Intel isn't highlighting their strenghts here because there are none. Their CPUs are (as of now) worse in every conceivable aspect than Apple's.

They are highlighting the strengths of products that use their CPUs, sure, but it's kind of funny because all those different laptops manage to beat the M1 MacBooks (each one in a different aspect) despite the Intel CPU, not because of it. If PC makers were somehow able to use M1 CPUs on their laptops instead of Intel's, they would all be much better products all-around, and they would still beat MacBooks at what they do now (display, battery, etc).

It's like saying... hey! our products are not that bad! here's a list of laptops with great features that thankfully weren't designed by us! neat!

 

[Alan Wynn]

More likely getting Apple customers to put pressure on Apple to retain Intel as an option. If if was me I'd pressure for AMD and only Intel if they outsource to TSMC or Samsung 5nm/7nm.

Except this campaign would not do that at all, as none of the points they make have anything to do with the CPU. Everything is about Windows or hardware configurations (ports, touch screens) that Apple did not have with their Intel machines (except for the multiple display option, something that will change with the next set of hardware).

 

[xxspirit4musicx]

Except this campaign would not do that at all, as none of the points they make have anything to do with the CPU. Everything is about Windows or hardware configurations (ports, touch screens) that Apple did not have with their Intel machines (except for the multiple display option, something that will change with the next set of hardware).

Tim Cook is just making a bad situation worse man it's that simple

 

[Alan Wynn]

Sometimes it's also someone's form of job security. There are many parts of the US govt relying on old stuff written in assembly or Cobol for that reason.

Years ago I had a consulting project with one of the largest banks in the U.S. to help them understand how to modernize some of their back office systems. Much of the software they had not really touched in years, and kept getting faster hardware in order to handle the increase in volume. The biggest problem they had was there was one part of the process where the data was punched on to cards, sorted by an automatic card sorter and then read back into the system for further processing. I asked what the sorter did, and was told that whole section was a black box. No one knew what it did any more and the last guy who knew how to program the card sorter had recently departed.

It took some time but found an old friend who knew how to read the automatic card sorter programming and re-create it. The fully digital process was enough faster that that it bought them time to figure what the whole process was and update it to something that made sense.

An old piece of software with limited functionality is rarely difficult to rewrite with modern tooling. Of course "if it's not broken, don't fix it" can apply, but usually it really is broken.

Yup that is the reality. Being dependent on something that is so unsupported that one needs to fun on a VM with an unsupported OS is crazy from a business risk standpoint. The longer one waits the more difficult it will be to even find people who could reverse engineer the old stuff to update it to something secure and modern.

 

[Alan Wynn]

Tim Cook is just making a bad situation worse man it's that simple

What? Steve Jobs famously opposed touch screen Macintosh systems and convertible systems. When Steve left Apple in 1985, his new company, NeXT Computer, Inc. picked the Motorola 68030, then moved to the Motorola 68040, and had a version based on the Motorola 88110 (The NeXT RISC Workstation) than never shipped. He always wanted to be on his own CPUs but did not have the volume to do so. Now Apple is big enough and powerful enough to build chips that meet there needs, rather than use someone else’s chips that are not specifically designed for them.

Tim Cook is taking a bad situation (Intel’s inability to deliver what they have been promising for years) and making it better by taking complete control over a critical piece of their core technology.

 

[xxspirit4musicx]

What? Steve Jobs famously opposed touch screen Macintosh systems and convertible systems. When Steve left Apple in 1985, his new company, NeXT Computer, Inc. picked the Motorola 68030, then moved to the Motorola 68040, and had a version based on the Motorola 88110 (The NeXT RISC Workstation) than never shipped. He always wanted to be on his own CPUs but did not have the volume to do so. Now Apple is big enough and powerful enough to build chips that meet there needs, rather than use someone else’s chips that are not specifically designed for them.

Tim Cook is taking a bad situation (Intel’s inability to deliver what they have been promising for years) and making it better by taking complete control over a critical piece of their core technology.

With all due respect Mr. Wynn, I read a news report last week that is saying that whatever semiconductor company in Asia is currently taking care of the mass production M1s, that their warehouse capacity is reaching over 65%. There is no guarantee, given the remote possibility that Mac user shares can grow, that they will EVEN HAVE the capacity to pour out these M1s. And Mr. Cook's business model is CRAZY.

 

[SeattleMoose]

I was going to send INTEL shovels so they could dig their own grave, but they are doing just fine on their own.
INTEL...the processor your grandma uses in her computer.

 

[Maximara]

Yup that is the reality. Being dependent on something that is so unsupported that one needs to fun on a VM with an unsupported OS is crazy from a business risk standpoint. The longer one waits the more difficult it will be to even find people who could reverse engineer the old stuff to update it to something secure and modern.

As I said earlier even Apple ran into that issue with Copeland. The System OS was such a crazy quilt of 68000 Assembly, Pascal, and C with after the fact ResEdit patches that huge sections had become black boxes. Another problem is some of the compilers for this code had had bugs and didn't work on later OSes. Hypercard was in much the same state (that is partly why XCMDs existed).

 

[Alan Wynn]

As I said earlier even Apple ran into that issue with Copeland. The System OS was such a crazy quilt of 68000 Assembly, Pascal, and C with after the fact ResEdit patches that huge sections had become black boxes. Another problem is some of the compilers for this code had had bugs and didn't work on later OSes. Hypercard was in much the same state (that is partly why XCMDs existed).

Yup. It amazes me when I read people effectively say: “We cannot possibly upgrade to XXX because our whole company’s business is dependent on a product that has not be updated in 15 years whose last creator died 10 years ago.”

If one has an actual viable business, one should be able to find replacement software or find other users of this dead application and band together to commission a replacement.

 

[xxspirit4musicx]

Yup. It amazes me when I read people effectively say: “We cannot possibly upgrade to XXX because our whole company’s business is dependent on a product that has not be updated in 15 years whose last creator died 10 years ago.”

If one has an actual viable business, one should be able to find replacement software or find other users of this dead application and band together to commission a replacement.

You have to respect the customers need man why is that so hard

 

[Alan Wynn]

With all due respect Mr. Wynn, I read a news report last week that is saying that whatever semiconductor company in Asia is currently taking care of the mass production M1s, that their warehouse capacity is reaching over 65%. There is no guarantee, given the remote possibility that Mac user shares can grow, that they will EVEN HAVE the capacity to pour out these M1s.

Please provide a source for your unsupported statement.

And Mr. Cook's business model is CRAZY.

Which business mode? The one where Apple captures all the profit in many of their segments? The one where even some of their smaller segments are larger and more profitable the many Fortune 100 companies? The one that gives them the highest customer satisfaction results year after year?

 

[Maximara]

With all due respect Mr. Wynn, I read a news report last week that is saying that whatever semiconductor company in Asia is currently taking care of the mass production M1s, that their warehouse capacity is reaching over 65%. There is no guarantee, given the remote possibility that Mac user shares can grow, that they will EVEN HAVE the capacity to pour out these M1s. And Mr. Cook's business model is CRAZY.

The company is called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and without seeing the article it is unclear if that warehouse capacity is due to Covid mucking up the supply chains up one side and down the other or something else. Besides things are such a mess in Asia that TSMC is planning on building a plant in the US. Never mind warehouse capacity is not the same as manufacturing capacity.

The promotional picture Victory Through Air Power (1943) illustrates the issue. The US could out produce nearly every other nation on the planet but the bottle neck was in getting that product to the battle site. If you can produce 1000 tanks a day but only ship 1000 a week then your warehouse capacity will go through the roof. All an increasing warehouse capacity shows is that there is a bottleneck in the supply chain.

 

[Alan Wynn]

You have to respect the customers need man why is that so hard

They are respecting their customers needs. They are building machines that are faster, quieter, cooler, and run longer on battery. Your argument seems to be that they would serve their customers best by ignoring the needs of the vast majority of their customers to support a tiny number dependent on abandoned applications. If these applications were in viable market segments, there would be current products that support them. Saying we need to still support 16 bit x86 applications like Windows does is a waste of limited resources does not serve their customers well.

 

[Maximara]

You have to respect the customers need man why is that so hard

That is not how things are supposed to work. While overly simplistic Yankee Dood It (1956) pointed out "a manufacturer who sticks to old equipment cannot compete, and must fail. To survive, he must persuade people to risk savings in his business. He can then buy new equipment, increase production, and show a profit."

Holding on to old software is the digital equivalent of sticking to old equipment and as Apple found out the hard way with Copeland that puts you in a bind when you have to finally upgrade the software. From a business prospective it is insanity as the longer you wait on upgrading the more expensive it will be.

I ran into this in my research on museum computerization in the mid 1990s. One museum was using this database written by a company long gone that would run on hardware newer then the 8088 they were using; the joke there it shouldn't be cataloging the collection but be in the collection.

One of the place I worked in was in far worse shape as it was using pre-DOS UNIX for the auditing software it was running...in the early 2000s. On a good day the audit took three hours. Then there was a change at the top and corporate required a system/hardware update. After the forced update the audit took perhaps 30 minutes and previously hard to see "hiccups" became obvious to spot and far easier to track.