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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

I love how the PC market slowdown is being headlined as causal when Intel has clearly done this to themselves.

Maybe if Apple's products were still "Intel Inside" Intel wouldn't be in this position.

I asked an Intel chip designer more than 10 years ago why they were not prioritizing mobile chips. He didn't have a good answer. It has been obvious for so long that everything was moving to phones, tablets, etc. The fact that Intel has no foot at all in that door is astonishing to me.

Sad thing is this has nothing to do with engineering and I'll bet a ton of those 20K employees will be engineers.

Piss poor management strikes again.

It happens. Data center computing is profitable, and Intel mastered the sales motion long ago. IBM never really got off mainframes for similar reasons. It's a variation of the Innovator's Dilemma.

I think IBMs case is a bit different -- after all, other companies may have innovated in the space, but they are the ones who actually came up with the PC standard we still use today (and then quickly lost control of it). By comparison, Intel has nothing to show on the mobile space, just a few half hearted attempts at mobile CPUs that fizzled out.

> IBM never really got off mainframes for similar reasons.

You could kinda say they made the PC? Also involved in PowerPC processors.

Not getting of mainframes were not their problem I think.

IBM made the PC but others monetized it, most notably Microsoft followed by Compaq and Dell. [0] The PC architecture was not proprietary, and IBM didn't control the operating system.

By contrast IBM made boatloads of money off mainframes and their advantage was durable. That business line is still quite profitable even today. (Just not very big in comparison to the IT market.)

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2021/08/25/attack-of...

It's almost funny that Intel did have a foot in that market in the 2000s. They sold off XScale right before the original iPhone was released. A lot of PDAs used XScale CPUs.

I think Intel just bought into their own Wintel uber alles bullshit and couldn't even conceptualize devices with TDPs under a watt. No one could possibly do anything worthwhile without Wintel so shed everything that's not Wintel!

Neither does Microsoft; great isn't it?

10 years ago, phones, tablets were the big thing. But smart management realized that no one was making money without a full vertical stack. The choices were iOS or Android. Besides Apple and Samsung no one was making money from phone and tablet. On the other hand - high performance computing and data center was a growing market. So smart money put the bet on high performance chips where you could have >50% margins. That's why AMD cancelled all their low power tablet chips (both X86 and ARM) and focused on Zen and the datacenter.

And ‘people not at home’? What does that even mean? People take their laptops to coffee shops? But so what?

I'm under the impression that for a large chunk of the population, spending most of their time on their PC during the pandemic was actually an undesirable lifestyle change. I suspect they might be changing back to doing whatever it was they did beforehand.

This seems like a reference to the situation during the height of Covid lockdowns, where people were stuck at home buying tech products.

In that case, the deeper read of the situation is that the Covid crisis helped them kick the can down the road by 3 years on responding to the trends of 2019.

There was a huge surge of people buying new gear to outfit home offices for WFH. That's over now. Not everyone is back in the office fulltime (obviously), but we'e not out rushing to buy new stuff when we just did all that not too long ago.

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