Stratechery - Apple, ARM, and Intel

The most important paragraph in this piece is last one, which plugs a $22.8 billion bill to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing in the USA and suggests the need for new entrants.

Semiconductor manufacturing is truly one of the few remaining manufacturing industries in which the USA has a competitive advantage (albeit quite eroded by TSMC over the past few years).

Especially with US aviation circling the drain, this is a sector we can't afford to lose. Removing semiconductors from US manufacturing statistics makes US manufacturing statistics go from "stagnating" to "extraordinary decline".

And it's not just the manufacturing sector. Semiconductors power some of America's most valuable companies (including but not limited to the FAANGs).

US economic and actual security absolutely depends on a robust supply of world-class semi-conductors manufactured on-shore.

Congress should take the advice in this piece and avoid making the same mistake with Intel that it made with Boeing (piling the bulk of all federal and state support for an entire sector into a single clearly dysfunctional company)

I wonder if falling to complacency is the fate of every formerly great company. Intel was so synonymous with semiconductor excellence for decades that it is hard to imagine a world where they are no longer relevant, yet here we are.

The missing piece of Apple's "hegemony" in its own ecosystem: Web Search. They still depend on Google, and it's surprising to me that they don't seem to care that much.

discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538894