[HN Gopher] Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge
___________________________________________________________________
Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge
Author : rbanffy
Score : 217 points
Date : 2023-04-28 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| mucle6 wrote:
| I saw this post, checked their stock price, and its up 5% since
| yesterday?
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Doing bad was expected, so the stock price was already down.
| The degree of badness was less bad than expected, so the price
| goes up a little.
|
| The same thing often happens in reverse: "Nvidia posts record
| profits" and stock tanks because an even bigger record was
| expected.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| hard to feel sorry for Intel here
|
| they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and
| more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a
| decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict)
|
| the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the
| performance the average person will need, with good battery life,
| a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right!
|
| Intel needs to seriously look at Linux...once Windows enters into
| a death spiral in a few years (seems inevitable now and Microsoft
| seems to not care as long as Azure keeps winning), what else will
| they have?
|
| start now with serious price cuts....I don't need to replce my
| Linux laptops, but would for the right price
| nullandvoid wrote:
| A similar priced mac > windows is ~2x the price, with no
| upgrade-ability options. I'm not so sure the price is right,
| it's expensive and they are making good money on it, but I
| agree does have some un-matchable features such as the battery
| life.
|
| I work with both windows (with WSL) and mac OS, and there's
| nothing massively that sells me either way on the base OS,
| however I really wish tools like raycast existed in windows.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn
| 't even seem to care afaict)_
|
| Of course they care.
|
| Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe
| that to be sustainable? Do we _want_ that? No, in both cases.
| They are still dominant in desktop computing.
|
| > _offers 10x the performance the average person will need_
|
| Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x
| the price "good value"?
|
| > _a better OS /ecosystem_
|
| This is debatable. I don't find MacOS to be all that great,
| personally.
|
| > _once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years_
|
| You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get
| back to us. They still _own_ the space.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and
| get back to us. They still own the space.
|
| Ah yes the dwindling, profit starved desktop market
|
| Yes they're still at a high percentage, of an ever smaller
| market
|
| Not going the way of the vinyl record yet, but who knows?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Keep in mind this includes laptops, which still sell well
| enough. (though declining)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and
| get back to us. They still own the space.
|
| Who buys desktops anymore? Sure, it's a market, but not the
| one it used to be.
| bdcravens wrote:
| "Desktop" typically includes laptops as part of the
| category, not separating them (since they usually don't
| have different OSes)
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/desktop/worldwide
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Of course they care.
|
| If they care they sure don't act like it. Microsoft is
| clearly squeezing Windows users for whatever revenue is left.
| Nothing else explains the user hostility, backwards
| compatibility breaks and unending advertising and data
| collection.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| My parents aren't technical and don't see the builtin ads
| and news feed as being user hostile.
|
| They like that candy crush is pre-installed and that
| Windows shows them random spam news articles that they find
| interesting.
|
| I hate it and use a Mac, but I suspect most users aren't
| like you and me.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| my parents and their friends are in their 80s and are ALL
| on ipads now, and this is by their own choice, not their
| kids pushing it on them
|
| nothing to "administer"
|
| the platform is curated
|
| it does what they need
|
| it runs on battery for a long time
| baremetal wrote:
| My parents are in their 70s and have run Linux for the
| last 15 years. Supported by me, of course.
|
| They don't know the difference.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| My parents are not technical but view pretty much all
| changes since Windows 10 as downgrades and annoyances.
| Things in the UI change randomly for no reason (e.g.
| copy/cut/paste are now unlabelled buttons placed in an
| unexpected spot of the context menu), the dark theme is
| buggy and can make the minimize/close buttons invisible
| and the few areas not touched by Windows updates were
| absolutely ruined by Dell. You may think the latter isn't
| connected to Windows, but you can't buy a Dell with Mac
| OS.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| In the short-term, Targeting older people (like your
| parents) who don't care works for Microsoft. But
| eventually they won't be around anymore.
|
| Take a look around and most people under 30 seem to have
| a MacBook. At least here in my area of the United States.
| neogodless wrote:
| I always wonder how people meet enough random samplings
| of young people to get this information!
|
| I have 9 nieces and nephews, plus some neighbor friends
| that have kids. Of them, maybe 2 or 3 use iPads. The ones
| that have laptops (other than school provided) have them
| for PC gaming, and they run Windows. I guess I'm in a
| different area of the U.S. from you, based on my
| anecdotal data.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I should clarify, When I say people under 30 I'm talking
| about young adults who are purchasing their own Laptop.
| Not children. So the 21-30 age group.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This is the real consequence of Intel being run by MBA
| sociopaths for two decades now.
|
| Intel (and AMD) needs a good consumer OS to keep it
| relevant in the next decades. It's what keeps the
| DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS on x86, and therefore use
| x86 server architectures. Either that, or it is a commodity
| ARM business.
|
| Microsoft has never been up to the task of a good consumer
| OS. Intel always should have had multiple irons in the
| fire, and with Linux they had a built-in weaponized
| competing consumer OS. They delegated all leadership to
| Microsoft rather than keep irons in the fire. WHich is ...
| ok ... when MS is the big monopoly on the block. That
| doesn't exist anymore.
|
| If Apple pre-iPhone produced OSX out of probably less than
| 100 or so engineers... Intel could have done that with
| 1/1,000th of their quarterly revenue. Or less! It's just
| spitshining an existing, working kernel, and adding a bunch
| of testing for the cacaphonous PC hardware/peripheral
| market that they were already at the nexus of.
|
| Apple had revenues of 6 billion in 2001, the first year of
| OSX. Intel make 26.5 billion in "a bleak financial year".
|
| It's not too late! It's still peanuts to do a spitpolish of
| Linux and do hardware testing/driver development for
| desktop linux! AMD or Intel (or a shared foundation) could
| do it! It could probably happen within a month. Partner or
| acquire ubuntu, or Suse, or ... anyone.
|
| This isn't just insurance. Intel has had DECADES of
| frustration getting Windows to fully use/support its
| hardware and CPU features. A lot of the time Windows would
| hold people hostage by waiting a major OS release (like for
| USB) before supporting something.
|
| Not with Linux. Boom, your stuff is supported as soon as
| you integrate it into your distro.
|
| This is the path to a key thing that Intel doesn't realize
| it lost: relevance. Microsoft has decided Windows isn't
| really relevant. That was Intel's only path to relevance.
|
| All the things they wanted to stay relevant in: x86 on
| phone, SSDs in PCs, Optane, etc. The path to that relevance
| was having a usable consumer OS. That you had good control
| over. You get your hardware demo'd and supported at maximum
| speed.
|
| Don't like Linux? Well fine, pick up OpenBSD, or whatever
| remnant of BeOS is out there. RedoxOS? whatever.
|
| Gelsinger probably is following a path of "get engineering"
| fixed. Well, ok, good strategy given how bad the MBAs
| fucked up everything. But Intel isn't the big daddy and
| that doesn't really solve the problems, it just mitigates
| the biggest bleeding.
|
| Intel needs SOFTWARE RELEVANCE. Intel does not have that
| anymore. Intel still has the resources and marketing power
| to achieve that. THE WINDOW IS CLOSING FAST. Regain
| software relevance.
|
| Just do SOMETHING.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| even if Windows survives, they will also likely move to
| ARM
|
| Intel is in real serious trouble, and so is AMD
| eitally wrote:
| This is largely why they hired Alyssa Fitzpatrick from
| Microsoft, and where the "Intel Accelerated[1]" software
| partnerships program came from. I don't know if it will
| work or not, but it's a start.
|
| [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/accele
| rated.h...
| meindnoch wrote:
| >Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at
| 2x the price "good value"?
|
| M1 performance won't be more than you need for long. When the
| dev community finishes transitioning to M1/2, that will be
| the performance baseline for lazy websites and electron apps.
| Intel laptops will have their CPUs pegged to 100% constantly
| when running more than one tab in Chrome. We're already
| seeing this at my company. Intel performance regressions are
| discovered the last minute before release, because everyone
| is using M1. And the solution is usually just to turn off the
| offending feature for Intel Macs. It's legacy.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I think normal people (ie non-developers) are less concerned
| about the performance, as the battery life and the need to
| almost never need a fan (and keep it on your lap
| comfortably).
|
| You can commonly find Macbook Airs at $800, and I doubt many
| are buying sub-$400 laptops, unless they are going with low-
| end Chromebooks, in which the Chromebook vs Windows is a
| reverse spin on whether consumers are overpaying vs what they
| really need.
|
| Dropping from 95% to 57%, I don't think it's unreasonable
| that a time will come when Windows no longer has a majority.
| ldhough wrote:
| > almost never need a fan
|
| While I am also concerned about and need the extra
| performance, this point seems somewhat underappreciated in
| discussions about the ARM macbooks. Fan noise is so
| incredibly annoying and distracting and I think not having
| it improves productivity.
| rjsw wrote:
| I'm just back home from a long vacation. My computer while
| I was away was my $250 Pinebook Pro, it worked fine for
| everything that I wanted to do, that included a fair bit of
| development work.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Anyone who is a developer is likely comfortable with
| Linux. I feel most non-devs could probably make do with a
| basic distro, but there's plenty of small gotchas that we
| don't even give a second thought to.
|
| Pine is clear who their audience is: "This is limited
| quantity production due to a severe global electronic
| components shortage. Please do not order the Pinebook Pro
| if you're seeking a substitute for your X86 laptop, or
| are just curious and you're ordering it with an intent to
| file a return/refund return request. These pre-orders are
| meant for enthusiasts familiar with the Arm architecture
| and interested in the PineBook Pro for this specific
| reason. Thank you."
|
| However, this does underpin the point that ARM-based
| computers are extremely viable.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need
| at 2x the price "good value"?
|
| So a MacBook Air is 2x the price of the very cheapest
| laptops. Trouble with the very cheapest laptops, though, is
| that they use the very cheapest chips; Intel is not making a
| lot of money on those (if they're Intel at all; these days a
| lot of that category is ARM Chromebooks). The MacBook Air's
| actual competition is more capable laptops in a broadly
| similar price range. These use more expensive, higher margin,
| usually Intel, chips, like the MBA did pre-M1. That has to be
| a concern for Intel.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Only in the US. A macbook air is much, much more expensive
| in most of the rest of the world.
|
| E.g. m2 air with bare minimum upgrades is 2000EUR. That is
| much more than double. So sure it is good, but at that
| price point that is the bare minimum.
| rainclouds wrote:
| I noticed this when traveling. It's almost like they
| never price adjust to currency outside the US.
|
| Sticker shock looking at Apple product prices in Japan.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| > Of course they care.
|
| for the last ten years Microsoft has pushed all of its effort
| into Azure, which is coincidentally based on Linux (!)
|
| accept it, they gave up on Windows. Windows 11 is my
| proof...a lame re-skinning which can't even displace Windows
| 10
|
| > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and
| get back to us. They still own the space.
|
| no one under 25 uses Windows! Go look at any college
| classroom and get back to us! Windows has been in decline for
| ten years, the stats aren't a fluke
|
| seriously...just walk into any college classroom in
| America...
|
| go see what ecosystem anyone under 25 is invested in...now
| tell me what the future looks like
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > just walk into any college classroom in America...
|
| America isn't the world. Walk into any classroom outside
| the US and you'll see something very different.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| the third world isn't buying Intel's top-of-the-line
| CPUs...
|
| go look at high-end Lenovo laptops with Intels' best
| CPUs...$3k+++
|
| Intel and AMD won't last long selling cheap CPUs to a
| shrinking Windows market overseas
| selectodude wrote:
| I am a lifelong Mac user. My work laptop is Windows. Always
| has been, always will be. My employer probably buys more
| computers every week than I will buy in my entire life.
|
| Nobody in the space gives a crap what laptops people buy
| for personal use once every 5-7 years.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| > Nobody in the space gives a crap what laptops people
| buy for personal use once every 5-7 years.
|
| maybe they don't, but Intel should
|
| btw my employer (Fortune 100 co) has switched to
| deploying Macs and will probably deploy close to 100k,
| all the Windows laptops are being timed out
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Azure hypervisor runs on a custom build of Windows.
| IceHegel wrote:
| If they cared there wouldn't be tabloid news in everything
| spare panel.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| I commented on thus somewhere else, but it seems fitting
| here as well: my non-technical parents love the tabloid
| news that Windows shows, and they love that candy crush is
| pre-installed.
|
| I suspect most users are not the same as the HM crowd.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Most mobile phone users aren't in the HN crowd, yet the
| iPhone continues to sell well. Why is this true, when a
| $199 unlocked Android is more than sufficient?
| damagednoob wrote:
| > Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need
| at 2x the price "good value"?
|
| I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive pair
| of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good value.
|
| > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and
| get back to us. They still own the space.
|
| What is the trend line and how much is that space growing by
| relative to other devices like mobile phones and tablets?
| Arrath wrote:
| > I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive
| pair of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good
| value.
|
| While a fair argument, I think its also fair to counter
| that the conditions in which you may use your boots don't
| arbitrarily change and get less efficient and more
| difficult over time. Sure maybe sometimes you'll be hiking
| through mud but that will dry out and get back to normal,
| whereas software might turn into quicksand as hardware gets
| older. Future proofing your hardware is effective, but only
| to a point.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned,
| was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots,
| for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus
| allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty
| dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort
| of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when
| the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were
| the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the
| soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-
| Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But
| the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A
| man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots
| that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time,
| while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would
| have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and
| would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel
| Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Until linux devs can get through their head that common users
| never want to even see something that represents a CLI, linux
| isn't going anywhere.
|
| The biggest problem with linux is that it's made by people who
| like linux.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| obviously, for Linux to ever see mass adoption it would need
| a drastic reformulation like Android
|
| my point is, once Windows passes the event horizon, Intel
| needs SOMETHING or they are going to see 2/3 of their revenue
| stream go away...cloud vendors are busy pushing ARM in the
| datacenter now too...Intel is running out of markets
|
| btw AMD is also screwed by all the same logic...x86 is on the
| endangered species list
| mock-possum wrote:
| Which apple M1 exactly are you saying is an 'incredible' value?
| The current-gen Air?
| foobarian wrote:
| > once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years
|
| I'm not sure, on the contrary I think in a few years Windows
| will be rewritten in Rust and entering a virtuous spiral. We'll
| see!
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The percentage of end-users who care about which language
| their OS is written in rounds to zero. Rust may add
| additional stability to the OS, but modern OS's feel pretty
| stable to the mom and pop users and "additional stability" is
| pretty far down the list of demands.
| [deleted]
| yyyk wrote:
| >they're [Intel] still tied to Windows
|
| Nonsense. Intel is one of the largest contributors to the Linux
| kernel, the biggest depending on what measure you count by[0].
| They even have their own distro.
|
| Moreover, much of their profit is from the server market, which
| tends to run Linux.
|
| >the Apple M1 laptop
|
| Is very expensive and is running MacOS.
|
| [0] https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/
|
| https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/
|
| https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Intel needs to seriously look at Linux...
|
| Does Linux need Intel though? ARM Linux systems are
| surprisingly nice. Asahi Linux is probably going to be the best
| Linux laptop experience.
| tbyehl wrote:
| > Intel needs to seriously look at Linux
|
| What should Intel be doing with Linux that they haven't already
| been doing for like 20 years?
| allie1 wrote:
| Better gaming drivers, better drivers all around. Their own
| linux distro for hosts that they keep optimizing for web, AI,
| compiling, testing.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Intel already have their own Linux distro:
|
| https://clearlinux.org/about
| yawniek wrote:
| i also don't really understand why they don't offer a similar
| software/hardware package ontop of linux as apple does.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the
| performance the average person will need, with good battery
| life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right!
|
| Ehh... Is it?
|
| I use the M1 issued by my employer. It's an okay machine in
| terms of hardware, but I absolutely loathe MacOS. I certainly
| wouldn't pay for the M1 at the price they sell it, way over
| expensive toy.
|
| I vastly prefer my personal machine, which is a 4 year old Dell
| with Linux Mint installed. A joy to use, powerful enough for
| everything I do (development, gaming), and has a GPU I can use
| to play with StableDiffusion.
|
| The only thing where the M1 is the winner is in battery life...
| But 99% of the time I use my laptop on my desk anyway, power
| supply is no issue.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| The M1 MacBook Air is regularly on sale for $800 or less. I'm
| not sure how you can consider that an "over expensive toy".
| It's competitive and often beating Windows Laptops at that
| price. The M1 chip is 2 years old now, and still competitive.
|
| I can understand hating the OS. But MacOS is my preferred OS,
| I really don't like Windows or Linux. MacOS just works. Linux
| and Windows always have some driver/kernel/etc. update that
| breaks something.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > The M1 MacBook Air is regularly on sale for $800 or less.
| I'm not sure how you can consider that an "over expensive
| toy".
|
| It comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of disk.
|
| Do you really need to ask why I call it an over expensive
| toy?
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Like I said it is competitive with other computers in its
| class. The Surface Laptop 5 is $1000 and also comes with
| 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. And MacOS Performas much better
| with 8GB than windows does.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| If your point is comparing over expensive toys, sure
| thing.
|
| I wouldn't buy either of those.
| bearjaws wrote:
| > and has a GPU I can use to play with StableDiffusion.
|
| You can run stable diffusion faster on a M1 pro macbook pro
| than on a 1080ti 3900x desktop. DiffusionBee, I get
| .7s/iteration on a M1 using just 45w of power vs
| .98s/iteration on my 1080ti using over 5x that amount of
| power...
|
| I could upgrade to a 4080 and I am sure it would destroy it,
| but I doubt your laptop has a full power 4080 anyway.
|
| > But 99% of the time I use my laptop on my desk anyway,
|
| As someone who works remote and has to travel for work,
| battery life is incredibly important to me, and the M1 is
| just leaps above its competition. I can write code and build
| all day without even plugging in on the M1 16"...
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > You can run stable diffusion faster on a M1 pro macbook
| pro than on a 1080ti 3900x desktop. DiffusionBee, I get
| .7s/iteration on a M1 using just 45w of power vs
| .98s/iteration on my 1080ti using over 5x that amount of
| power...
|
| At what cost?
|
| > I could upgrade to a 4080 and I am sure it would destroy
| it, but I doubt your laptop has a full power 4080 anyway.
|
| Mine has a GeForce 2060 RTX. Not in any way overpowered,
| but runs games and StableDiffusion fast enough.
|
| That at a fraction of the cost of an M1 Pro too, and the
| added benefit of not having to use MacOS
| the_overseer wrote:
| What exactly is so wrong with macOS? It's unix at the end
| of the day...
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| 1080ti released in 2017. M1 released in 2020
| mschild wrote:
| The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive.
|
| Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at
| 1k USD pretax. That's not within reach for a large majority of
| the worlds population. Not even within reach for a lot people
| in richer western countries.
|
| Most people need a Webbrowser that can do Email, Streaming, and
| some social media.
|
| What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still
| have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it
| doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.
| sokoloff wrote:
| You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to
| get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to
| replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it
| gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin
| it in 3.5 years.
|
| https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-
| apple-m...
|
| I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a
| lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next
| entry-level step up.
|
| Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're
| $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an
| M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the
| market.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You could buy a laptop with 16GB to 32GB of memory and more
| than double the storage space for $800, and you can buy
| laptops that you can actually upgrade the hardware on. You
| can also spend less and get a similarly spec'd laptop. I
| just picked up a new laptop with 16GB/1TB and 8 cores for
| $500 and upgraded it to 64GB of memory for $100.
|
| I bought a low end Mac in 2015 with the same 8GB/256GB
| specs, 8GB wasn't enough even for browsing/chat/media/etc
| at the same time, and the storage space gets eaten up by
| the macOS base system and apps.
| philistine wrote:
| What about the most important laptop spec: the case. Is
| your 500$ laptop using a metal case, or are you stuck in
| plastic city?
| temac wrote:
| If all that matter to you is RAM and HD space, you can as
| well buy a cheap desktop tower. As for "similarly spec'd"
| laptops if you put good perf and low consumption in the
| equation, they just do not exist. Yes Intel Mac were not
| extremely interesting at least on the CPU + GPU + RAM +
| HD + power side of the equation. The M1/M2 is - esp if
| you also value a decent screen. And the M1 + 8GB is
| reasonable depending what you are doing with it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have an 8GB/256GB 2015 MacBook Air. I use it for web
| browsing, messaging, spreadsheets, watching media, email,
| and photos. It has worked fine for me the whole time, and
| I usually have it connected to an external display.
|
| I doubt 80%, maybe even 90%, of the population needs
| anything more than that.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in
| 5 years
|
| My mom uses a cheap Dell laptop that is 10 years old. I
| bought at the time for around 350 dollars is memory serves
| (it was in a different currency, so it is hard to do the
| conversion).
|
| She is non-technical, and it absolutely suits her needs to
| this day. Only thing I did in terms of maintenance was
| buying a new battery.
|
| The cheapest Mac just won't get the same cost/lifespan
| ratio.
|
| Keep in mind that the vast majority of users are non-
| technical.
| KomoD wrote:
| > You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now.
|
| > the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up.
|
| Costs $1575 in my country, and significantly worse spec
| than laptops in the same price range
| thfuran wrote:
| I struggle now with 16 GB on my work laptop. 8 is
| absolutely anemic for anyone planning to get several years
| out of a machine.
| omnimus wrote:
| I have 8gig and its completely fine for webdev work. Its
| faster machine than my desktop. It has to be completely
| fine for majority of work people do on computers.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 8GB is pretty sad though and it's soldered on with no
| ability to upgrade
| shinycode wrote:
| But it's more than RAM and it's enough even for web dev
| so for most people it's way enough
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If
| you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you
| have things like browser windows open, you will have a
| bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running
| Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of
| the question which made mobile app development difficult.
|
| If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight
| editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB
| has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.
| danaris wrote:
| Did you try it on an Apple Silicon Mac?
|
| There was a lot of discussion of this at the time the M1s
| first came out, with loads of people (who had never
| touched one) confidently declaring that 8GB of RAM was
| far too little...and then nearly everyone who actually
| _bought_ an 8GB M1 Mac saying "yeah, it might not handle
| _heavy_ loads well, but that 's what the Pro machines are
| for--in normal use, it has no problem at all with 8GB."
|
| And then a bunch more people talking in a fair amount of
| detail (that kind of went over my head) about what Apple
| did to improve memory management with the M1 so that this
| would be possible.
|
| So don't assume that 8GB on an Intel Mac is the same as
| 8GB on an Apple Silicon Mac.
|
| Now, it does sound like you were trying to run a whole
| bunch of rather heavy stuff on it--y'know, the stuff that
| one might call "pro", and possibly even buy a "pro"
| machine for? The kind of thing where if you're buying the
| _absolute bottom of the line_ , you might be able to
| _expect_ that it wouldn 't work well.
| bernawil wrote:
| I honestly think it was all just hype, or some sort of
| FOMO of every reviewer not jumping on the M1 hype-train.
|
| I own a base Macbook Pro 14", 16GB RAM. If anything, it
| feels like less than 16GB (maybe because the shared video
| memory or macos bloat) saved by the fast SSD that's
| inevitably going to fail not too far and turn the laptop
| into e-waste.
|
| I feel like every single talk point of the early review
| cycle was a huge exaggeration:
|
| 1. battery life just browsing the web is no more than 4/5
| hours. Like any other windows laptop.
|
| 2. Performance is really nothing special really. Things
| like maximizing/minimizing a youtube video are choppy and
| lag for 2/3 seconds.
|
| I mean, it's still the best value in the market for the
| screen, keyboard, chassis, speakers combo but Apple
| Silicon is extremely overrated.
| shinycode wrote:
| I don't assume, I currently have a MacBook Pro M1 with
| 8gb of ram. It all depends on what kind of tools and IDE
| you have. When I avoid a having 50 tabs on chrome and
| only the apps I need it's perfectly usable for web dev.
| Of course 16go is more confortable but I'm working with 8
| with no problem on light web dev.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years.
| Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything
| other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't
| actually need the M1.
|
| BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200
| EUR.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| Agreed. My personal laptop has 8GB of ram. It's fine for
| web browsing, sorta usable-ish for light development, but
| limiting for power use.
|
| I bought my laptop in 2015. This underscores your point:
| Buy something upgradable with decent specs and you'll get
| a lot more bang for your buck.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect
| to get 5 years out of it minimum
|
| Some people simply do not care about tech to a point where
| almmost any price is too high. I just had to persuade a
| relative to spend $250 to replace a 16+ years old Intel
| Core Duo with an HDD. It takes 2 minutes to open a browser
| window on that thing and she didn't even consider that a
| problem. The replacement will probably last until it
| refuses to boot.
| shortrounddev wrote:
| > 5 years
|
| Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with
| incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going
| until they physically break.
|
| But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer
| desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be
| for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their
| computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who
| don't own a laptop.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with
| incompatible software updates._
|
| Um, I have a 2012 MacBook Air (11"), that I use for my
| low-end testing, and as a Zoom host. Works fine. Runs
| lots of software.
|
| It has to run Catalina (Mac OS 10.15), but Apple still
| pushes out security patches to it (I think we're up to
| 10.15.7).
| whstl wrote:
| Same here. I still have the same, 2012 11" Air, and it's
| my "travel" laptop. It had a battery replacement a few
| years ago (and Apple did for free!), but other than being
| a Netflix machine, I still code low-level stuff and
| frontend in it.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| How'd you get Apple to replace it for free? I thought all
| coverage would have expired...
| whstl wrote:
| It was in 2018, so after only six years. Five years ago,
| time flies... And the battery was swollen up, it actually
| damaged the trackpad. I went to the store to get an
| estimate, but they said they'd do it for free.
|
| I wonder if it was a recall. I didn't speak German that
| well back then so it might have gotten lost in
| translation. I recently also had issues with my Airpods
| Pro and they replaced for free, but they told me it was a
| recall.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I also had a swollen battery in a 2013 Macbook Pro that
| was eligible for a free replacement in 2018 or 2019 (I
| forget exactly when, but it was before the 2019 16"
| Macbooks came out).
|
| It was covered outside the normal warranty because of the
| swelling issue. Mine swelled to the point where the
| trackpad was slightly unreliable.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm not sure "forcibly kill" is the adjective/verb I
| would have used. I have plenty of older Macs still
| running older versions of Mac OS. In some ways I kind of
| prefer them (because I still like the older Mac OSes).
|
| Maybe this is more of an indictment rather than a defense
| of Apple, but one machine I keep on an OS that's over 5
| years old because it has the one version of Apple's
| Photos that didn't yet screw up the retouch tool. (And I
| use that tool exhaustively in retouching old family
| photos I scan in.)
| smolder wrote:
| *adverb/verb
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm embarrassed for that one.
| [deleted]
| nytesky wrote:
| My MacBook Pro was supported by OS updates for a DECADE.
| I have a MS SURFACE Laptop Gen 1 from 2018 I can't update
| to Win 11 -- and will EOL in 2026. That's from the
| flagship microdot branded laptop.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Windows machines keep going until they physically
| break.
|
| That's interesting, as I just this month replaced the two
| kids' Dell 9020s with new PCs because the 9020s didn't
| support TPM 2.0, required by Windows 11.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-
| tpm-2-0-o...
|
| "Most PCs that have shipped in the last 5 years are
| capable of running Trusted Platform Module version 2.0
| (TPM 2.0). TPM 2.0 is required to run Windows 11, as an
| important building block for security-related features.
| TPM 2.0 is used in Windows 11 for a number of features,
| including Windows Hello for identity protection and
| BitLocker for data protection."
|
| The 9 year old Dells were running just fine on Windows 10
| (same as the 9 year old Air was on Catalina), but
| upgrading to the latest OS in both cases required a
| purchase.
| smolder wrote:
| There's really no point to upgrading to win 11,
| especially if it's unsupported by your working PC.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I'm curious why you felt you needed to upgrade. To my
| knowledge Windows 11 doesn't do anything that Windows 10
| cannot, except for support Intel e cores.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They wanted to play Valorant with their friends; the
| anti-cheat code did not work on the 9020 on Windows 10;
| there was a limited amount of time I was willing to spend
| to find a cheaper workaround for a machine that's 9 years
| old, with the prospect of doing the same again 6 months
| later.
|
| That was the actual driver, though this thread is about
| OS vendors forcing changes in order to run the latest OS,
| which is why I focused on the Win11 TPM2 requirements and
| mentioned the 9 year old Air running a still-patched
| Catalina.
| smolder wrote:
| I don't believe you needed to upgrade to windows 11 for
| valorant compatibility. You just needed to be on a recent
| build of windows 10, downloaded from windows update.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Maybe. We always have Windows Update turned on, so it was
| almost surely up-to-date and I spent a period of time
| over several different evenings trying to get this to
| work. Whatever error message came up when jumping into
| the gameplay part of the game led to the TPM issue being
| the root cause. Ultimately, we'd gotten our 4 years of
| value out of the Dells (4-ish years old when we bought
| them) and decided it was reasonable to replace them.
|
| To the point of this sub-thread, it's still an OS vendor
| forcing a purchase to run the latest OS. 9 year old
| Macbook running Catalina and 9 year old Dell running
| Win10, both unable to update to the latest OS seems very
| close the same to me.
| doikor wrote:
| You still would have had ~3 years left before windows 10
| goes EoL (consumer version)
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| > Windows machines keep going until they physically
| break.
|
| which isn't good for Intel!
|
| cpus are expensive to develop...
| zpeti wrote:
| This is the opposite of my experience. My wife still
| easily uses my old Mac that's 8 years old. No performance
| issues.
|
| Most windows machines I had worked for around 3 years. 5
| max.
| pjmlp wrote:
| All my Windows machines from 2009 are still pretty much
| ok, while having been upgraded to Windows 10, came with
| Windows 7, and went through 8 and 8.1 as well.
| raddan wrote:
| > Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with
| incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep
| going until they physically break.
|
| This is demonstrably false. My wife continues to use my
| hand-me-down MacBook Air I bought in 2011. It was
| supported officially by the macOS until the most recent
| release, so she's only one OS revision behind. I also
| recently retired a 2009 Mac Mini that I used 24/7 as a
| home server, only because the power supply failed. I used
| the G4 Mac I bought in 1999 as my daily driver (with some
| upgrades) until 2009.
|
| A decade or more of use is an incredible value, and I've
| done that multiple times with my Macs. Few of my PCs have
| had a useful life approaching that length of time (the
| closest was an Atom machine I ran for 7 years).
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They
| still have a good 75% market share
|
| The biggest threat to Windows isn't Apple and Linux, it's
| mobile phones. People aren't buying computers like they used
| to. Most day to day things can be done on a smartphone now.
|
| I see this first hand in my own family. My wife and mom both
| use their phones for pretty much everything. Email, web
| browsing, etc. If my wife needs a bigger screen for something
| like a yoga video, she usually uses a TV in the house which
| has a Roku, chrome cast, or similar attached.
| bhouston wrote:
| > The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one
| you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD
| pretax.
|
| Get the MacMini. The low end M2 Mac mini is $599.00 USD right
| now, although the one I run for my desktop is the more
| expensive one at $2,199 with 32GB, more cores, more gpu and
| more drive space.
| mschild wrote:
| That's not a laptop so you still need to buy a screen,
| keyboard, and mouse.
| bhouston wrote:
| Adding that will add another $150 if you buy it at
| Walmart. You are correct.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Macs are incredibly good value. The M1 Air actually starts at
| 800$ if you chase the deals and $900 if you buy from Apple
| with education discount.
|
| Nothing ever comes to the quality at that price, so even if
| you can buy much cheaper laptops those suffer in quality and
| performance. This means the value per dollar is not any
| better than MacBook Air, unless you are extremely short on
| dollars.
|
| Also the re-sell value of Apple products is good and combined
| with the durability of Apple laptops(this is where the
| repairability folks fail to convince most people because for
| most people Apple devices don't break down, they become
| obsolete after extensive use) the money spent on Macs turns
| to be an investment. The "Apple premium" you pay when you buy
| an iDevice is actually a recoverable when you sell it.
| mschild wrote:
| I agree they are but what if you can't afford to spend 800
| or 900 on a laptop?
|
| There's also plenty of people who use their laptop until
| it's dead. Infact, I'd argue it's probably more economical
| to purchase a repairable laptop and replace parts as
| needed.
| mrtksn wrote:
| If you can't afford $900 you shouldn't be buying a laptop
| unless you absolutely need it in short term to get out of
| your current situation. You are probably in a precarious
| state, not really a chooser at this time and all you can
| do is to sort by price and buy the cheapest.
| mschild wrote:
| Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world
| doesn't run high paying western salaries. Most people
| earn significantly less. The average monthly indian
| salary, by now the largest country in the world
| population wise, is roundabout 450 USD.
|
| Your advice boils down to just get richer and don't be
| poor.
| mrtksn wrote:
| My advice is, don't spend your money on low quality stuff
| unless you absolutely have to(i.e. maybe you will do some
| data entry stuff to buy food, then maybe you can spent a
| few hundred dollars on a laptop but if you are not in
| that kind of a situation save up buy something of good
| value later).
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| > Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world
| doesn't run high paying western salaries
|
| but that hurts Intel too...their profit margins are in
| their high-end CPUs
|
| people keep talking about the cost of Macs but they're
| cheaper than most Windows laptops...
|
| go look at the HP, Lenovo sites...they're not steering
| people toward $400 laptops
| mschild wrote:
| Not massively advertising low cost options and not having
| any at all are wildly different things.
|
| Of course companies push the items with the highest
| margins. They want to make money after all, but they
| still have plenty of options in the sub 600 category that
| will last 5+ years under normal use without issue.
| There's obviously a market for low priced laptops,
| otherwise so many companies wouldn't build them. And it
| doesn't hurt Intel. If the choice for them is to sell a
| low margin CPU or none at all, they're gonna sell the low
| margin CPU.
| okasaki wrote:
| If you're looking for value and durability, you can buy a
| used business laptop like thinkpad or dell latitude.
|
| You can get a used thinkpad with an 8th gen intel and 16gb
| ram for $200 maybe.
|
| Sure the cpu will be slower but with 8gb ram on a mac
| you're not going to be doing much anyway.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The screen will be terrible, the performance will be 1/3
| of the M1 air, the battery life will be useless and the
| device itself will be heavy.
|
| Bad deal overall. At that price I would prefer a
| Chromebook.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| AMD's 5nm chips compete with and outperform the M1, low
| end laptops ship with 16GB of media by default, 8-10h of
| battery life is good enough for most people and Dell XPS
| laptops, for example, weigh 1.17kg, which is less than
| the M1 Air.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Can you give me a link to such a device? Sub 1000 laptop
| with 10H battery life, lighter and smaller than Air,
| higher performance than M1 sounds good.
|
| I wonder why people buy those about Air heavy, about Air
| performing premium and expensive laptops then.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| The M1 MacBook Air lasts over 12 hours on battery and
| runs silently and cool while being fanless. I purchased
| mine new on sale for $750. Where is this magical laptop
| that beats the M1 Air?
| ncphil wrote:
| Thing about ThinkPads is that there's almost always a
| premium option for hardware like screens that can be
| dropped in with nearly tool-less effort. I have an old
| X250 that I recently upgraded from the crappy 1366x768
| shipping display to a new 1920x1080 for $60. The real
| problem with that model (besides the ancient 2 core CPU)
| is there's only a single RAM slot, and anythinng more
| that 8 GB is hard to find (and way more expensive than
| warranted).
| okasaki wrote:
| I mean not really, I have a x1 tablet here and the
| performance and battery is fine, the screen is very nice,
| and it's not heavy.
| beefield wrote:
| > performance will be 1/3 of the M1 air
|
| I run an old (I think maybe 4 or 5 years) thinkpad with
| 64GB RAM. I see often these claims of superior
| performance of new macs, and it leaves me scratching my
| head. I do not have (almost) any workflows where the
| performance is not sufficient. For the ones where
| performance is not sufficient, I am happy to turn on my
| desktop. So my question is, what are the workflows people
| have benefit from the superior performance of new macs
| _and_ at the same time do not justify working on a beefy
| desktop?
| mrtksn wrote:
| The primary thing you notice is the snappiness. It's like
| going from an HDD to SDD. Everything happens faster.
|
| Beyond that, it depends on what you do.
| blagie wrote:
| > What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They
| still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates,
| it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.
|
| Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in
| Android, typically on ARM. I think my observations are a
| little biased, but not a lot. According to statcounter:
|
| Android 41.56%
|
| Windows 28.29%
|
| iOS 17.29%
|
| OS X 7%
|
| Unknown 3.05%
|
| Chrome OS 1.32%
|
| Critically, it's no longer a monopoly; there's a lot less
| lock-in than there once was. Even Microsoft Office is
| gradually moving to the PWA model. Most servers and embedded
| systems I see run some variant of Linux as well. The market
| Microsoft has 75% share in seems to increasingly by a niche
| market within a much larger ecosystem. Microsoft seems to
| have pivoted, and as someone pointed out, no longer cares too
| much.
|
| However, the Wintel monopoly is dead. If Intel is tied to
| Windows, they'll increasingly be swallowed alive. TSMC
| manufactures most of those ARM chips. There's no way a
| smaller player can keep up in fabs and manufacturing
| technology.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android,
| typically on ARM_
|
| Comparing cell phone OS to a desktop OS is a bit silly.
| Nobody in the corporate world is doing work on Android.
| josteink wrote:
| His point was trying to measure OS market-share by
| checking desktop-only is no longer a valid approach.
|
| Even big players like Microsoft are forced to offer their
| software and services on non-Windows platforms (like
| mobile and tablets!) if they want to remain relevant.
|
| So counting desktop only paints a false picture, wrt
| where users are and where computing is happening.
|
| And that last bit is what is relevant from a Intel POV.
| An increasing amount of compute is now done outside the
| Intel-chip arena of desktops, like it used to be before.
| blagie wrote:
| Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate
| desktop" market.
|
| If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that
| niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC,
| Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc.
|
| At the end of the day, it comes down to manufacturing
| volume. Volume leads to investment in next-generation
| technologies. More investment means, at some point,
| competitors can't keep up. Manufacturing doesn't care too
| much about who the ultimate end user is.
| shortrounddev wrote:
| Why not
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| The "niche" market is corporate and gouv.
|
| These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive
| to maintain and to integrate into their existing active
| directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where
| the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design)
|
| No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon
| from those.
|
| The android market share is mainly mobile devices and
| Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on
| azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv
| world.
|
| The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and
| processes that would cost a fortune to replace.
|
| Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to
| undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe
| though you're referring to servers.)
|
| I generally agree with your point though but I am seeing
| that as more and more of office work moves to living
| within a web browser, it is becoming more hardware
| agnostic.
| danaris wrote:
| I was doing work on an IBM AS/400 mainframe in my
| previous job, just over a decade ago. It supported Java
| and Tomcat (which was fairly current at the time) out of
| the box. The only oddity I needed to deal with was making
| sure I had a proper JDBC driver for its DB/2 database.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it
| anymore, but mainframes are definitely still around.
| blagie wrote:
| > (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to
| undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe
| though you're referring to servers.)
|
| No. It's reality. Mainframes are here to stay. IBM
| continues to develop and sell plenty of mainframes.
| Several other manufacturers do as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16
|
| Where I work has applications dating back decades with
| complex data analysis algorithms developed by very smart
| people. Strict backwards-compatibility is critical. We
| have mainframes.
|
| There are many other reasons to run mainframes. For
| example, mainframes offer pretty incredible features with
| regards to redundancy, and making everything hot-
| swappable in case of failure without interrupting
| workloads. That's especially useful in places like the
| financial industry. There, a single failure or error can
| cost much more than a mainframe.
|
| They're a niche, but a big enough one to support a multi-
| billion dollar business. It shrunk for many years, but
| it's currently even growing.
| smolder wrote:
| Mainframes don't get that much recognition outside of the
| niche they occupy, but they really aren't going anywhere.
| whstl wrote:
| _" These industries won't buy macs as they are too
| expensive to maintain and to integrate into their
| existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions
| for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic
| design)"_
|
| I'm not convinced. About ten years ago one could say
| exactly the same thing about Macs companies located
| outside of California. I only had my first work Mac in
| 2012, when I convinced my boss to let inherit one from a
| graphic designer. Since then, I've worked in two
| extremely traditional corporates that gave me the choice
| to use macOS. And plenty of executives were/are using
| macOS too.
|
| In the meantime things got actually easier than 10 years
| ago: web apps became prevalent and even Microsoft joined
| the party.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| > Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.
|
| but if it continues to shrink (and it almost certainly
| will), then Intel (and AMD) are in big trouble
|
| Intel can't exist servicing a niche
|
| IBM isn't trying to float a multibillion market cap
| solely on the back of their mainframe CPUs...
|
| and of course let's not forget that Microsoft is also
| continuing to hint at future Windows-on-ARM...the first
| try failed but I have heard more talk...
| sokoloff wrote:
| Price cutting by enough to pull your demand forward is probably
| a losing strategy for Intel. If they cut their CPU price in
| half, would they sell twice as many? I doubt it.
|
| Their gross margin is between 40 and 50%. Call it 50% to be
| generous and make the math easy. If their selling price today
| is 6X and they sell U units, their gross profit is 3 * X * U.
| If they cut the selling price to 4X and sell 2U units, the
| resulting profit is around 2 * X * U. If they were somehow able
| to move 3 times as many units with a 33% price reduction, their
| gross profits would stay about the same as today.
|
| What would a 33% reduction in the price of the Intel components
| in your laptop mean at retail? A 10% reduction in the shelf
| price? 15% maximum?
| ezconnect wrote:
| Intel is not just selling CPUs.
| slashdev wrote:
| When it came time almost two years ago to get a new laptop, I
| had a choice between a MacBook Pro for over $4000 or an
| Alienware that I could modify with 64gb memory and an extra SSD
| for half the price. Bare metal gaming with better performance
| and even though it doesn't support Linux, it supports it better
| than Mac. Cost half as much. No futzing around with packages
| that don't work on the M1, just good old AMD x86 goodness. The
| battery life sucks, but that rarely bothers me.
|
| I'd love to buy an Apple, but it has never been priced
| competitively. My wife's MacBook broke and it costs almost as
| much just to fix as to buy a new laptop.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I'm curious what those prices would look like today. In 2021
| I bought a MBP M1 Max with 32 Gb RAM and a 500 Gb ssd for
| about 3k.
|
| Looks like a max spec Alienware X14 R2 costs around 2,100
| dollars. However the battery life seems to be the biggest
| drawback, most reviews say it lasts under 8 hours while my
| MBP lasts 12-16 depending on usage.
| allie1 wrote:
| The x86 ecosystem is far superior to Apple Silicon, and that is
| not going away any time soon.
|
| Macs have one big advantage - efficiency, which translates to
| long battery life and more importantly for me personally - NOT
| OVERHEATING.
|
| However, porting software to apple silicon results in
| inefficiencies, and for developers it gets a bit trickier.
|
| I have a M1 Max with 65GB ram and I love it, but the moment
| Intel comes out with chip that doesn't overheat and is as
| performant, I'll be buying an Intel based laptop (granted, I
| will have to wait for longer).
|
| In a perfect world, Apple would get back to offering Intel as a
| CPU option when Intel comes back to the leading edge. You'd get
| the Mac OS, x86 and performance in a well built laptop - a
| dream!
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| What inefficiency are you talking about? Graviton instances
| in aws run general software better than x86.
| allie1 wrote:
| I was referring to personal computer usage. Yes, usage
| specific chips can be a better option, but as far as
| general processing/usage is concerned, I'd take x86 over
| Apple Silicon any day of the week.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Overheating is entirely down to the profiles the
| manufacturers use. Intel processors can be efficient, but
| usually they get clocked to the moon on desktop. Laptops are
| so all over the place it's impossible to judge them either :/
| allie1 wrote:
| I haven't tried limiting clock speeds to keep the laptop
| cool, and it seems a bit crazy investment to buy a laptop
| to try that, but I do have an old MBP with Intel that I can
| test this with.
| smolder wrote:
| You won't see power efficiency and temps comparable to
| apple silicon on the Intel MBPs, being 14nm, though you
| can probably get a nice marginal improvement like giving
| up 10% performance for 20% less power draw. The newer
| chips from AMD and Intel are comparably efficient to
| apple silicon with a restrictive power envelope.
| neogodless wrote:
| > chip that doesn't overheat and is as performant
|
| Does it have to be Intel, or would you consider AMD?
|
| Yes, if you look back even just to Zen / Zen+ laptop chips,
| they were not impressive, but Zen 2 and newer based chips
| (Ryzen 4000 or higher) are performant, efficient, and do not
| overheat. There are some crazy 7045HX chips that are
| basically desktop chips that you wouldn't want in your
| laptop, but the 7040HS line is exactly what you were waiting
| for (as well as the 6000U and 6000HS line). Unless you need
| Intel over AMD for some reason?
| allie1 wrote:
| This is helpful, thank you. I prefer Intel due to personal
| biases, but I will research AMD.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| AMD's 5nm chips outperform the M1 and M2, although they are
| not as power efficient, they have a very low TDP, run cool
| and idle at basically nothing.
|
| Given them another node shrink and they'll be even better.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Intel is well underway on the same journey that IBM took decades
| ago. That is the transition from a Computer Engineering company
| to a Financial Engineering company. This never works well. Never,
| ever, let an finance or sales person near the top spot at a
| technology company.
| jscipione wrote:
| Something is going on with Xeon-W. Intel started "shipping" Ice
| Lake Xeon-W in June 2021 [0], yet today in April 2023 major PC
| OEM vendors such as Lenovo, [1] Dell, [2] HP [3] and Apple [4]
| are still shipping workstations with the older Skylake Xeons in
| them and none of them offer a workstation with Ice Lake Xeon-W.
| Either the chips are not available in volume or a large segment
| of the PC industry decided not to update their computers to use
| the new chips.
|
| [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ice-lake-xeon-w-
| to-c... [1]
| https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-s...
| [2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-
| certified/p... [3] https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/z4.html
| [4] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
| giantrobot wrote:
| The case for Apple is sort of obvious, the Mac Pro has always
| been slow to rev and has always had slow sales. Apple has also
| been transitioning to their ARM CPUs so they're not going to
| double down on x86 on a single line of machines.
|
| I'd imagine other manufacturers are in a similar boat. They put
| in orders for Skylake Xeons for machines that sell slowly.
| Pandemic sales went into laptops for home offices rather than
| $5k desktop workstations. Desktop workstations have never flown
| off the shelves but are flying off more slowly than normal.
|
| Ryzen and i9 laptops and a beefy VPS have been good enough for
| many WFHers so no one is buying desktop workstations.
| Manufacturers aren't going to jump to new Xeon parts if they're
| sitting on old stock.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Andy Grove writes in his book about inflection points. They
| should probably move beyond the cozy x86 and Windows business and
| look into the future.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Easy to say but what would that future be? The only thing that
| could replace Windows is Linux. Intel funds Linux but there are
| fundamental issues there that stop it taking over. They could
| try and develop their own OS and PCs, a sort of reverse Apple,
| but do they have the money, staff and ideas for it?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "Easy to say but what would that future be?"
|
| I thought figuring this out is why the big shots get their
| 50,000,000 dollar paychecks :-)
| wslh wrote:
| Only the paranoid survive [1] I don't think Intel passed Andy
| Grove's wisdom to the organization.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove
| rqtwteye wrote:
| It seems they may be at an inflection point where they should
| move away from x86 and create the next big thing. Pretty much
| what Grove describes in his book.
| allie1 wrote:
| I disagree. They need smaller, more efficient chips, they
| just fell behind.
|
| Intel was the major driver of EUV in its inception. They
| funded ASML, only to sell their share later to keep the semis
| ecosystem open (oh the irony...).
|
| They are making all the right moves now, but the semis cycle
| is ridiculously long. 5-6 years from planning to delivery.
|
| x86 is what keeps them in the running for now, as there's so
| much software built on it, but if they don't stick to their
| roadmap and start leading with their products, that edge will
| also degrade.
| tonightstoast wrote:
| "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.
| Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only
| the paranoid survive." Andy Grove
| garganzol wrote:
| Those words are a pure gold. So true.
| ogogoggogogo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...
| jl6 wrote:
| I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to
| profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy
| over the past year or so: supermarket and oil & gas companies are
| posting record profits. They are riding the wave of price rises
| and supply constraints. What's different about CPUs?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| They missed the boat on 2 biggest growth areas: ARM (mobile) &
| GPU (gaming, crypto, AI), and screwed up x86 (AMD made some
| better chips / Apple walked away).
|
| Screwing 1 of those up is a problem, screwing up all 3
| simultaneously is near-bankrupting.
| Clamchop wrote:
| As a casual observer, Intel seems to have commitment issues.
| It's not like they haven't made or are not making attempts in
| some of these markets but they can seem half-hearted even
| when those ventures aren't mothballed or sold off outright.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away
|
| This means Intel didn't lose Apple just because of execution
| because Apple could have trivially gone to AMD.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Their development model was 'tick / tock'[0] with the tick
| being smaller processes, increased frequency, lower-power.
| All of those are largely outsourced (or outsourceable) to a
| fab. The tock step was introduction of new
| microarchitectures. Intel has been historically hit or miss
| with this, the default is to take what they did and do more
| of it rather than come up with entirely new and sound
| designs. I would say for large established companies the
| greatest factor in these kinds of differences is how high the
| engineering culture goes up the reporting chain.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yeah that was their well known dev model for many decades.
|
| However they seem to have missed a number of tick cycles as
| of late, so their efficiency gap to ARM got worse and
| worse.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There was huge purchasing of equipment at the start of the
| pandemic to enable work-from-home. Most of which is still
| current enough to not need replacing.
|
| Meanwhile it's possible that the high food and energy prices
| are impacting the amount of money available to spend on tech
| goods ..
| windowsrookie wrote:
| At the beginning of the chip shortage, Intel's CPU just weren't
| very good. AMD was beating them at performance and efficiency.
| Intel has caught up now, but their chips still use
| significantly more power than the current AMD chips.
|
| Intel spent a lot of time and money developing their new Arc
| GPUs. They were delayed and they missed the crypto boom.
| Drivers and GPU performance were disappointing even after
| delaying the launch. This first generation of intel GPUs will
| be a huge loss for them.
|
| Intel is less diversified today. They sold their LTE modem
| business to apple a few years ago. Intel exited the ARM chip
| business ~15 years ago, right before the smartphone took off.
|
| Intel is now losing the server chip business. AMD is making
| competitive sever chips for a lower price. Larger companies are
| developing their own ARM-based server chips.
|
| Intel is going to start using their foundries to manufacture
| chips for other customers. It remains to be seen if Intel can
| compete with TSMC.
| dralley wrote:
| > Drivers and GPU performance were disappointing even after
| delaying the launch. This first generation of intel GPUs will
| be a huge loss for them.
|
| To be fair to Intel, some of this was legitimately
| overwhelming bad luck - their GPU driver team for Arc was
| based out of Russia.
| rektide wrote:
| To their credit, the gpu drivers have continued getting much
| much better, much faster.
|
| Intel has long understood the value of drivers, has been one
| of the primary contributors & drivers of really good open
| source (albeit with some frustrating areas of sore neglect,
| like GMA500/Poulso) (But also rip the incredible
| http://01.org those folks were amazing at finding high value
| open source work to do!). Im glad to see making an already
| quite reasonable priced value GPU a lot better.
|
| But yeah the timing is after the GPU craze. And Intel has
| been tweaking the same way-too-big big core for too too long
| & is uncompetitive. And they've been hurting to get a 7nm
| process (Intel 4) going. A lot of change is necessary.
| seunosewa wrote:
| AI has kickstarted a new GPU craze. Hope they catch this
| one.
| philistine wrote:
| One could conceivably assume that they're talking to Sony
| and Microsoft about putting their GPUs in their next
| consoles. I'm not sure Microsoft would bite for
| compatibility reasons but Sony seems ready to make another
| blunder.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| It's possible, but AMD has supplied console APUs for two
| generations now because they are willing to sell them for
| cheap. Intel has never been interested in low-margin
| items, but they may need to be in the future. AMD has
| really targeted the gaming APU market. They make the
| chips for the Playstation, Xbox, and Steam deck. They
| also recently announced a new chip for gaming handhelds
| that Asus is using in their new ROG Ally device.
| stefan_ wrote:
| CPUs are made on cutting-edge processes, the chip shortage was
| about jellybean or specialty chips made on very different
| (generally older) processes.
| jnovek wrote:
| If I understand the situation correctly, most of the chips in
| short supply use old fab processes which are not Intel's
| specialty.
| stephen_g wrote:
| They are very different types of goods... Food and energy are
| required by everyone, so when the supermarkets and energy
| companies decide to price gouge and profiteer (as they have
| been), people have few other options than just to pay the
| higher prices... People and businesses can mostly just delay
| buying new computers if they are too expensive.
| Aromasin wrote:
| In 2020, Intel generated a record $35.4 billion cash from
| operations and $21.1 billion of free cash flow (FCF) and
| returned $19.8 billion to shareholders. They profited
| _massively_ , and put their dividend up 5%.
|
| They brought in Gelsinger and used that cash to build 2 new
| leading edge fans, and upgrade capacity on newer ones. Then the
| economic downturn happened, and sales dwindled. They're making
| less revenue but still funding the production of new fabs. That
| coincided with a weak roadmap. Sapphire Rapids is only just
| starting to ramp, after a nearly 3 year gap in their Xeon
| roadmap.
| bane wrote:
| Intel and Google share surprisingly similar problems: an almost
| pathological inability to grow lines of business with new
| products because they kill them off too early. In Intel's case,
| it's even worse, they kill them off right before the market would
| have made them successful. They should own the "things with
| semiconductors" market, but instead financially engineered their
| way to focus only on higher profit core chip business which was
| good for the short term but has proved to be a festering cancer
| over the long.
|
| Because of this approach they divested out of the memory business
| -- which has kept them out of the growing solid state business,
| screwed around with Optane, lost their modem business, have lost
| the GPU business at least once (who knows if they'll keep doing
| the ARC GPUs so maybe it'll increment up again), ARM chips, and
| numerous other bits and pieces over the years. Now they're losing
| their core business too and have nothing else to really grow and
| focus on.
|
| Each of these is a multi-billion dollar market with core
| providers who dominate the market: Samsung, Broadcom, Nvidia,
| etc.
|
| Now they're going to start selling off the bones of their
| business to compete with TSMC, a company with actual focus.
|
| Once that goes away, what? Intel will contract TSMC to make their
| chips? I can see a financially focused MBA-type executive team
| seeing that as a way to eliminate expensive Fab R&D, construction
| and OEM liabilities -- put it on somebody else to deal with that!
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on
| higher profit
|
| You explained the core of the problem that usually gets little
| blame. Successful companies get infiltrated by Wall Street MBA
| types who make decisions for the short term to manipulate the
| stock price because their own compensation structures help
| encourage that behavior. Companies, especially like Intel
| should be built for being resilient over decades instead of
| maximizing profits by the quarter.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Successful companies get infiltrated by Wall Street MBA
| types who make decisions for the short term to manipulate the
| stock price_
|
| This really applies for Intel, but for Google, I think it's
| less so. I've been thinking you have to look at incentives
| and at a large corporation _everyone_ is incentivized to make
| the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. If
| you really want to spend years hammering away at something,
| it made more sense to just start your own company doing that
| where you would reap most of the benefits through equity.
| There is no reason for someone to spend years at Google on a
| project that is seemingly going nowhere; they would struggle
| to get promoted, and if it does work out, most of the value
| will go to existing shareholders.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Why not? Getting a project up is a struggle anyway. And
| it's a trade off between the upside and downside risk. At
| Google there is little downside risk and upside is
| reasonable. One or two experienced and passionate
| engineers, hammering away, amplified by a big company can
| compete with a startup.
| nemothekid wrote:
| The downside risk is only marginally different. If you
| are "passionate" engineer at Google, going to startup
| means making 150k rather than 350k. Don't get me wrong,
| 200k is a lot, even in the bay area, but it's not like
| you are destitute. If it doesn't work out you can always
| return to Google. The upside is completely different.
|
| Secondly, you are also at the mercy at your VPs, who got
| to that position by also maximizing short term results. A
| VC may not have the tools to force you to pivot if you
| are making ump-teen million dollars in year 1, but a VP
| may decide to kill your project to move more experienced
| engineers to another pet project. A passionate engineer
| at a pet project is an anomaly at a large corporation,
| who also has to fight the political winds of people
| trying to maximize their short term gains. And I don't
| think those people are wrong, it's the rational thing to
| do, especially when any equity upside will go largely to
| existing shareholders.
| kazen44 wrote:
| Bert Hubert had an excellent talk which exactly describes the
| problem of this phenomenon[0].
|
| [0]: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/
| dghughes wrote:
| Like Bed, Bath and Beyond. Obsessing over their stock price
| and ran out of cash to buy actual things to sell. Now
| bankrupt.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on
| higher profit
|
| See also Boeing (?).
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Intel is the poster child that if you want to run a giant
| business long term -- have _independent_ , well-supported teams
| that deliver a profitable product on their own... and are
| insulated from being fucked with by anyone in the management
| chain.
|
| Modern Intel would have shut down the Haifa team, which would
| have been an existential problem when Netburst reached the end
| of the line unexpectedly early.
|
| At that scale, you need to keep teams/options around simply to
| retain expertise and hedge your tech bets.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Intel got out of memory when that became a complete commodity,
| similarly Intel sold their NAND business (now called Solidigm)
| a while ago to Hynix, because similarly NAND and SSDs are now
| commodities (in the sense of highly standardized,
| interchangeable product made by a large number of competing
| companies). It does make sense if you only wish to keep things
| where your company has unique advantages and doesn't need to
| compete solely on price in a commodity market.
| bane wrote:
| You are absolutely correct in the history to my recollection.
| But I'd challenge that it was a good idea as having multiple
| product lines better creates opportunities for new and unique
| products in different spaces.
|
| Optane is an example of where Intel tried to "fake it" but
| ended up producing a confused product that didn't leverage
| common industry knowledge in either the memory or solid state
| storage spaces. More towards a near future, Intel should be
| looking at compute-on-memory hardware, which promises to
| radically improve computation in a number of areas, and
| fundamentally would give them an "in" into neural network-
| like tech.
|
| Similarly, the companies that do produce NAND and SSD
| technologies seem to have figured out how to make money in a
| commoditized and highly competitive market.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| How did Optane represent faking it? It was and still is the
| fastest persistent storage ever made, no? I thought they
| killed it because of the difficulty of manufacturing it.
| bane wrote:
| It died because the first generation of Optane devices
| failed to take the market by storm and instead of
| advancing the technology they simply exited the market,
| eating all of the prior investment.
|
| Why they failed to take the market seems to be both a
| combination of lousy marketing (is it a drive, or are
| they RAM replacements?), selling only enterprise-class
| products, high prices, and competition technology that is
| both "good enough" and beats it in all of the other
| areas.
|
| Spec-wise, a Samsung 2TB 990 Pro, is about as fast
| (sustained, IOPS, etc.), a 10th the price, and is coming
| from a manufacturer with a reputation of sustaining
| development and releasing newer, better products in that
| product-line. If the part fails, you're likely to not
| only replace it, but upgrade it for the same cost.
| scrubs wrote:
| I agree! When memory became a commodity --- there are
| periods in markets when nobody confers distinction --- then
| maybe you keep your hand in to break even or small profit.
| But keep your eye on the next evolutionary step. Compute
| co-located with memory (non von Neumann) is that step. With
| the hw, there'd be an opening for a next gen OS to run it.
| rektide wrote:
| It's extra bitter to see Intel exit NAND because they largely
| invented & drove NVMe. The p3700 was the first mainstream
| NVMe drive, July 2014, & is still a beast, still pleasantly
| fast with stable & high iops, albeit lacking in raw
| bandwidth.
|
| The before times were so awful. A sea of proprietary
| interfaces, dubious drivers. Intel identified a huge weak
| point in the ecosystem & created radical change where it was
| needed, taking something exotic & astronomically priced &
| building a stable better future, around what has always made
| PC so exceptional: standards. The flash industry was a mess,
| & Intel more than anyone made it real.
| [deleted]
| jandrese wrote:
| I think Intel missed the boat when they refused to accept third
| party fabbing back when they were process node leaders. So
| instead that business went to TSMC and other competitors and
| made so much money that those companies were able to overtake
| Intel and are far more diversified so they don't live and die
| on the PC market.
|
| At the time everybody was saying "of course Intel isn't going
| to fab AMD chips, that would be crazy", but in the end the
| crazy thing was giving up market dominance.
| papercrane wrote:
| Seems like a theme with Intel. Back in the 80s Acorn was
| evaluating using Intel's 286, but Intel didn't want to work
| with them so they ended up making their own CPU, which
| directly led to ARM.
| irisgrunn wrote:
| This is incredibly similar to what's happening (has happened)
| to Philips.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Can you explain more? I also sense the Philips is a fading
| giant, but I struggle to a put a finger on it. Part of it
| might be that it is constantly spinning out divisions into
| separate companies.
| masklinn wrote:
| They don't just spin out divisions, they keep spinning out
| innovative and revenue generating divisions, leaving
| Philips with no ability to do anything, and with what
| they're currently doing: selling the brand for Chinese
| white-labels to put on their product as they try to move up
| the chain.
|
| Essentially Philips had spent 30 years selling the bones of
| the group, leaving just a skin-suit. Which they're now
| selling as well.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Here's a video essay on this:
| https://youtu.be/WE58YisgFeQ
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| ARC GPUs are basically dead on launch. It's not competitive in
| any way and fundamentally broken upon release. Intel integrated
| graphics works because it's a value-add to an expensive
| component already necessary for many computing products.
|
| ARC GPUs is basically Intel expecting the market to be the beta
| tester for a very expensive & inferior product.
| kazen44 wrote:
| very expensive product?
|
| have you seen GPU prices lately? The intel a770 is quite a
| good deal, especially considering you get 16GB of vram when
| the competitors only offer this at a far higher price. I kind
| of agree with you that the product has had issues at launch,
| a lot of them are resolved however. Also, linux support is
| superb compared to nvidia.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Intel will contract TSMC to make their chips?
|
| They've been using TSMC for various parts/chips for probably 5
| years now.
| j_walter wrote:
| They have been using TSMC for a few decades for many of their
| chips. The last ~5 years has been the cutting edge
| chips...but they still have a lot of old chips made by TSMC
| still (think ethernet controller chips, etc).
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I believe this is handwaving for Intel.
|
| Intel lost money because computing started moving towards GPU
| architecture and AMD has both beat them in low power CPU and
| offer cheap GPU.
|
| That's all. They were too late to GPU sales.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Is there really a "too late" here? GPU sales today are
| probably a small fraction of future AI (TPU?) chip sales.
| Seems like Intel should be racing in this direction no matter
| how long it takes them to catch up, no matter how
| unprofitable it is in the short term. But maybe there's
| something fundamental that ensures they'll never catch up?
| pas wrote:
| management issues, comp issues. those are not fundamental,
| but it seems an awfully sticky sauce, and they seem neck
| deep in these.
| shadeslayer wrote:
| AFAIK the Intel Alchemist die is already fabbed by TSMC [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Intel will contract TSMC to make their chips?
|
| "Intel Battlemage, Celestial GPUs Are Booked in at TSMC:
| Report"
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-battlemage-celestial...
|
| Order recently deferred to late 2024, though.
| causi wrote:
| Personally I think Intel lost the plot around the time they
| killed Atom. Atom launched as a garbage product, then they
| spent a decade refining it into an incredible combination of
| price, performance, and power consumption. Then they killed it
| and replaced it with processors that offered barely 10% better
| performance per watt at five times the MSRP and they wonder why
| the Intel tablet market is dead. It's dead because they
| strangled it in the crib by pretending Pentium Gold Y-series
| was an adequate successor to Cherry Trail.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I think Intel's tablet ambitions and their larger Atom
| ambitions died because they tied them to Microsoft.
|
| The Atom could have been bundled as an easy to integrate SoC
| for things like set top boxes, routers, and smart devices
| running Linux/Android The sort of uses that go for MediaTek
| or AllWinner ARM SoCs. Intel had all the peripheral IPs to
| make competitive offerings.
|
| Instead they put the Windows millstone around the Atoms' neck
| and the chip sucked. Intel based tablets sucked because
| Windows was a dog shit OS for low end devices. The few Atom
| based Android tablets that got made were pretty decent
| devices.
|
| I've got a bunch of Bay Trail devices lying around. The ones
| I've put Linux on end up being very useful little devices
| that run very well. My Windows Bay Trail tablets are just
| e-waste at this point. They're difficult to use _at best_ and
| typically just slow pieces of crap.
| srj wrote:
| They also killed off larrabee right before the GPU market
| took off. Even if they were behind on it there was so much
| potential.
| squater wrote:
| They didn't kill off the Atom line, they just dropped the
| Atom naming [0][1]. They are typically also dirt cheap [2].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremont_(microarchitecture)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracemont_(microarchitecture)
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Nucbox5-Desktop-Computer-
| Windo...
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I live in Columbus, and over the next few years I expect a lot of
| shakeup to occur as a result of the Intel fab(s) being built
| nearby. It's been interesting to see the turbulence around Intel
| of late, given what a huge investment we're expecting to see from
| them in Ohio (not to mention the huge investment the state will
| be _making_ into Intel, via tax abatements and other incentives).
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Let's hope it actually gets built and that the state isn't
| Foxconned like happened to Wisconsin. A company with rapidly
| declining profits does not give me a lot of confidence in
| starting or finishing big capitol projects even if they've
| committed to them. Nothing is set in stone until the last brick
| is laid and the factories are open.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Unlike foxconn, the federal government has a huge interest in
| that fab being built.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it. At the end of
| the day capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic
| nationalism. If it's cheaper for Apple and others to build
| chips overseas then all your devices will continue to have
| chips made there. I don't see any fundamental change to
| make labor in America competitive with overseas labor
| costs. Intel can build as many fancy fabs as they want in
| Ohio but they will be useless if the cost of living, cost
| of healthcare, median home price, rent, inflation, etc.
| continues to skyrocket. It's still too expensive for
| workers in America and building factories doesn't fix that
| problem.
| BeetleB wrote:
| People in this thread are a bit clueless on the economics
| of it.
|
| Many of Intel's existing fabs are in the US, and they've
| never really stopped building them here - particularly in
| Oregon and Arizona, and they continue to build there. The
| only difference is that now they're building on yet
| another site. The bulk of their fab process R&D is in the
| US, and they perfect the flow for a given process here
| and their international fabs then follow suit.
|
| Why do they continue to build in the US? The CEO answered
| this over and over during his campaign for the CHIPS act:
| Running fabs is significantly more expensive than labor
| costs. They don't really save that much by building
| abroad.
|
| When it comes to cheaper things like packaging, the labor
| costs do matter, and so they do that abroad.
|
| So no, Ohio won't be foxconned. If Intel doesn't do well,
| Ohio will be dead, but they're not going to build
| elsewhere to save on costs. There isn't much to save.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic
| nationalism.
|
| I'm not so sure about that. At an individual level sure
| but we're talking about the USG not a bunch of
| individuals at a national level. The government has made
| many decisions to subsidies/backstop local companies in
| the interest of nationalism.
|
| There's no way it's cheapest for Boeing to make its
| airplanes in the US.
|
| Janitors for the USG get security clearances.
|
| Farmers (even by state governments) get subsidized to
| ensure local supply.
|
| If something like the "Freedom Phone" actually used USA
| parts and was assembled in the USA I could see it
| becoming the governments defacto corporate phone. Sure,
| they might become a "Government Contractor" as opposed to
| an actually competitive company but they would still
| exist with real buildings and real employees doing real
| activies which is strictly what we're arguing about. The
| USG will backstop an inefficient business; Foxconn has no
| problem not building an inefficient factory.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Deciding to give Intel massive subsidies would require
| congress to agree and enact legislation, and that isn't
| happening with it being a politically fractured senate
| and house. It also isn't exactly sustainable to just keep
| funneling truckloads of money into Intel to be
| competitive and kind of pokes a giant hole in the idea
| that the free market is supreme at solving all problems.
| In the end subsidies just contribute to rising inflation
| (it's printing money). The fundamental problems have to
| be fixed.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Deciding to give Intel massive subsidies would require
| congress to agree and enact legislation, and that isn't
| happening with it being a politically fractured senate
| and house.
|
| Eh, sure congress has apparently only passed 1 bill so
| far this year [1] but you can go look up other split
| years (i.e. 2013 [2]) as a reference. They actually pass
| a lot of bills despite what people say and the first 4
| months of the session are always slow.
|
| Ohio is a R state so republicans won't bring up deficit
| issues (not that they actually care about them).
| Democrats (obviously) voted yes on the CHIPs act last
| year so its not like they're going to change their mind
| now. The remaining parties aren't a large enough
| coalition to matter.
|
| > It also isn't exactly sustainable to just keep
| funneling truckloads of money into Intel to be
| competitive
|
| Unless you're going to argue the USG is going to become
| insolvent prior to Intel finishing the fab in Ohio this
| is an irrelevant argument. The USG will be around longer
| than it takes to build a fab and as I brought up in my
| previous comment; plenty of companies are not competitive
| on a global scale but they still turn a healthy profit
| because the USG backstops them.
|
| > In the end subsidies just contribute to rising
| inflation (it's printing money)
|
| Well, you can subsidize something without printing money.
| I think printing money causing inflation has been trivial
| disproven though by the 2019 pandemic where governments
| printed money like mad and no inflation occurred until
| years after the fact. Unless of course you want to argue
| the free markets are so inefficient they took 2-3 years
| to correct for that money printing?
|
| [1]: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2023?type=bill&s
| tatus=pa... [2]: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2013
| ?sort=asc&order=Last...
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Yes, this is a major unsolved problem to my eye. The cost
| of living in Columbus - while nowhere near the craziness
| of coastal cities - is steadily rising. Real estate in
| surrounding cities is also going up, and it's hard for me
| to imagine how all those working the jobs that will
| supposedly be created by the fabs will afford to live
| near them.
|
| One development in Ohio has been a proposal for a
| passenger rail line that would connect Cincinnati,
| Columbus, and Cleveland. I'm originally from Crestline -
| a small town which sits right on the rail line between
| Columbus and Cleveland, and which used to be a big
| railroad town. It's interesting to think of how my
| hometown might change if passenger rail were to actually
| happen (though I'm skeptical, as versions of this plan
| have been proposed for decades).
|
| That said, there are some major problems to overcome if
| we wanted to start doing "state-scale" transportation
| like that - Columbus is a very car-centric city, and in
| the scenario where I would move home and ride the train
| to Columbus when I needed to go to the office, it's very
| unclear how I'd get from the station to wherever I'm
| going.
|
| Furthermore, there was just a very public and
| catastrophic train derailment in Ohio, which can't do
| much good for public confidence in commuter trains.
|
| Either way, the next decade or so in Ohio will certainly
| be interesting. Columbus has a burgeoning tech community
| with lots of VC investment, and while I'm not sure where
| I'd put the odds, it's not impossible that our little
| flyover state could become the proverbial "heartland tech
| hub".
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yeah I lived in Columbus and other parts of Ohio for 15
| years or so and it strikes me as bizarre to try to bring
| industry back. Rubber, steel, automotive, etc. industries
| were absolutely massive in the 50's, 60's, 70's. But the
| corporate raiders of the 80s destroyed and sold off all
| the factories to replace them with cheaper offshore
| labor. The cost of living in Ohio only continued to go up
| and most cities in the state are filled with suburbs full
| of homes now approaching $500k or more. It's just not
| sustainable or sane to think some new class of factory
| workers can jump in and live there while being
| competitive on labor prices.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > most cities in the state are filled with suburbs full
| of homes now approaching $500k or more.
|
| I still get Zillow emails from my time living in the
| state. $500k is in the rearview mirror. A lot of new
| developments in the "nicer" suburbs are hitting the $1MM
| mark. $500k buys you a new home in the far, far suburbs.
| $250k gets you a 800 sqft 40s-50s ranch in a
| "crestfallen" neighborhood (and the price history on
| Zillow will show it as being sold for $60k 10 years ago).
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yeah I lived there when 60k could get you a home and 100k
| was, "woah there Mr. Mansion-haver" money. My mind
| boggles at spending 500k there now and barely getting a
| couple bedrooms. Nowhere in Ohio should it cost that much
| to have a home.
| jewayne wrote:
| Yeah, upper middle class people are predictably out of
| touch with reality. The median _household_ income in
| Franklin County is only $66k. Yes, stupid zoning made
| building non-McMansion houses difficult, but that doesn
| 't mean the working class just magically disappeared.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| Intel pulled the same trick in Washington State. After the
| plant was built and Intel got all the tax incentives and free
| money, they scaled the plant down to just package chips
| manufactured overseas.
| xxpor wrote:
| I wasn't even aware there's an Intel plant here. Where is it?
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| Dupont, although I think it might be closed now. They tore
| down some of the buildings four or five years ago.
| xxpor wrote:
| Looks like it's an Amazon FC now, if it's the land next
| to the "Intel DuPont community garden"
| sl0tr4cer wrote:
| closed for years and the state clawed back their tax
| break
| RyanShook wrote:
| I think Intel is a buy because they're going to be too important
| to fail for US in the chip war. Anyone else buying?
| chasd00 wrote:
| When they get on the verge of bankruptcy then i'll buy. They're
| too "big/important to fail" and will be bailed out by US
| taxpayers as usual.
| stickfigure wrote:
| It's hard to guess at a reasonable valuation for a company kept
| on life support in the national interest. Could be lower than
| current price?
| RyanShook wrote:
| It's a good question. Intel P/E is around 17 while Nvidia is
| around 82. With government support or infusion I have a hard
| time seeing it go lower.
| [deleted]
| 64operator wrote:
| With the stunning 1-2% year on year gains in speed, when you're
| not losing 10-20% of your performance for mitigations, who sees a
| compelling reason to upgrade their computer? Laptop, workstation,
| or server?
| 1024core wrote:
| And the stock is up.... SMH. Can never figure out Wall St.
| kube-system wrote:
| Because the people moving big money on the stock market are not
| sitting around waiting until earning reports come out to make a
| move. They already knew intel was going to post a loss, this
| was not news to the market.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| You're not wrong, but I think this misses the point.
|
| Even retail knew they were estimated to post a loss. I'm
| guessing something in the earnings report was "less bad than
| expected" in order for the stock to be up 5% today?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Think of it like sports.
|
| You don't want to go where the ball is right now. You want
| to go where you think it will be in the _future_.
|
| I don't usually do sports analogies, but my kid recently
| started playing soccer and I've been trying to get her to
| intercept rather than chase people. Heh.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Pretty good analogy.
|
| I think one of the biggest concerns right now (maybe
| always?) in the stock market is "things will stop being
| gangbusters, the economy will slow, growth will slow, and
| the ball with stop being projected to be in front of
| you/forward at any scale/pace"?
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, the market will often move in the direction of the
| delta between expectations and actual results.
|
| People often assume it "should" move in the direction of
| the overall sentiment (good earnings = up, bad earnings =
| down), but that is not at all true because earnings reports
| are a retroactive view of information people have already
| been trading on.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Well, in this case, isn't it still that simple?
|
| Actual results came in better than expectations (hence
| the "delta" you are referring to)
|
| What metric did Intel beat on?
|
| This quarter EPS/revenue/some metric/growth? Or guidance
| for upcoming quarter less bad than expected?
|
| All it takes is one or two "good" things and everything
| else with "in line as bad as expected", as you know.
| kube-system wrote:
| We don't know what expectation they beat, because traders
| expectations are not a monolith, nor are they public
| figures.
| uptown wrote:
| INTC is up over 5% in premarket trading.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Indeed, the first sentence
|
| >While Intel's sales *beat its own expectations* in the first
| quarter, the company on Thursday posted the largest loss in its
| history as its margins plunged to a new low over the last
| several years.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| They've had the shit pounded out of them over the past couple
| of years already, this is probably not unexpected.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-forecasts-second-qu...
|
| > Intel says margins will recover in second half of 2023,
| shares rise
|
| stock market movements are not to be trusted a period less than
| a quarter at the very least, better yet an year, imho.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I just looked and AMD now has a LARGER market cap than INTC.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It's not actually vital for Intel as a company to survive? As
| long as the foundaries and designs survive. Somebody else will
| take the business away from them.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That is not how it works, with modern tech having the foundries
| and designs is not enough to fabricate products that work.
| nico wrote:
| In the next 1-5 years we are going to see a lot of big companies
| falling apart.
|
| Small teams, with the help of tech/AI can now move so much faster
| than big teams. The communication and coordination overhead is
| starting to be too big of a burden, especially when you can have
| 1 person do the work of 30-100 (using AI).
| danpalmer wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true given hardware as a limiting factor.
| Small teams have always been able to move faster in building
| things, they have fewer requirements and less to lose.
|
| But small teams can't buy expensive hardware up front, and
| modern AI is hardware constrained for many purposes. These
| companies will either end up renting hardware from cloud
| providers, or using AI APIs from cloud providers.
| davemp wrote:
| > when you can have 1 person do the work of 30-100 (using AI)
|
| That's quite the statement. I highly doubt that will be reality
| in the next 1-5yrs, especially for novel R&D work. Even more so
| for products in the physical world.
| garganzol wrote:
| Sarcastically, moving fast (while breaking things) is not the
| exact way to a success because nothing works at the end.
| Glemotooo wrote:
| Hard to understand your comment in context of intel.
|
| There are a handful fabs around the whole world who can even
| make those chips intel and tsmc can do.
|
| No one will just replace any of them in any near capacity at
| all.
|
| And the entry to this level of tech is not 'just a few
| millions' ist actually (just making a fab with people and
| processies of people who know how to do this) is 10-20
| billions.
|
| And if you would take any software company i also disagree: I
| was working in a small company, they didn't knew security
| really. I intriduced a ton of security. In comparision to the
| huge company i'm now: The developers still don't know much
| about security but the security teams of my company do.
|
| In my opinion the gap will be even bigger because small
| companies (besides the cool and hip new elite startups) still
| have more of a traditional mindset while the big onces need to
| compete. They need to use AI and co and they have the financial
| background to create AI teams.
| drumhead wrote:
| This looks like some big bath accounting by Intel. Getting all
| the bad news out of the way in what was expected to be a bad year
| anyway.
|
| The next couple of years will be make or break for them, so Im
| expecting to see some good things coming out of their pipeline.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| Doesn't the bathing come in the form of write offs and
| investments? Sales decline is never good. But it's hard to say
| they have any good products Ive considered buying in the past
| two years or so. I actively right now wouldn't consider a pc
| option if it came with intel.
| jross225 wrote:
| Haven't read the report, but accounting tricks like deferring
| revenue to the next period and writing down receivables would
| affect revenue/earnings.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > Sales decline is never good.
|
| It can make future results look better. If you don't mind
| reducing revenue now you may get in exchange more revenue in
| the future - and a more favourable baseline for growth
| calculations.
| zpeti wrote:
| Stock is up 5% as of posting this, so I think the market
| already priced in something even worse potentially.
| Aromasin wrote:
| 36% down YoY, but they beat investor Q1 consensus. Analysts
| predicted worse than this, so they've exceeded market
| expectations. Sapphire Rapids is only just starting to ramp
| sales, and the Emerald/Granite Rapids & Sierra Forest
| roadmaps are on track, which is the first time the Xeons have
| looked healthy in nearly 4 or 5 years. They trimmed the fat
| by selling off all businesses but their core ones, and are
| announcing IFS customers every other week. I'm not surprised
| investors are starting to move.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Can't edit my comment now, but I just looked at the
| earnings report and they're actually up $200m on what they
| forecasted, so that'll be why the stock is up.
| drumhead wrote:
| For something of its size and potential its way too cheap.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Intel gets MBAed.
| j_walter wrote:
| This is absolutely what happens when bean counters are promoted
| to CEO...they killed Intel a long time ago. Finally put an
| engineering guy in charge, but he is blowing smoke up investors
| asses...you can't dump billions in new fabs and technology
| while also losing billions per quarter.
|
| Their foundry business is dead...they won't compete with
| Samsung and TSMC. Even GF found that was a losing proposition
| and they had a lead on Intel and endless pockets of cash.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| They boost the share price for a while, but then the
| competition takes over. Leadership get rich.
|
| Steve Jobs has the best explanation for this.
| https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It's interesting that every large American industrial
| corporation eventually succumbs to MBA fever.
|
| In the 20th century, we saw the rise and fall of General
| Electric, Westinghouse, GM, RCA. Huge American corporations
| with products almost everyone interacted with almost every day.
| In the 1960's these were the corporations to beat. In the late
| 1960's, bean counter infiltration began. Of these companies,
| only GM isn't a hollow brand licensing shell, and it had to
| survive a government-maneuvered corporate bankruptcy to make it
| to 2009.
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