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But what does that actually mean in terms of strategy? Server and enterprise products have the highest margin. Normal consumers, aside from the small gaming s

But what does that actually mean in terms of strategy? Server and enterprise products have the highest margin. Normal consumers, aside from the small gaming segment, are price sensitive. Are they shifting away from the consumer PC market?

hedora 1y ago
Presumably, they’ll need to abandon cloud and hyperscalers too. That leaves legacy enterprise. (ARM or AMD are going to have better $/perf, and be closer to the dev workstations/laptops, so the only thing Intel would have left is inertia.) If they actually execute this strategy, sales implode and the CEO is gone. If they don’t, he demonstrated he can’t set policy, so he’s gone.
hakfoo 1y ago
Perhaps they're looking at specific empty slots in the competitive product lineup and doubling-down there. I'm sort of surprised, for example, that LTS embedded is not more of a thing. Sell something like those little N50/100/150 mini-PCs, (or more likely an ITX mainboard with the same specs) but for an astronomical price and guarantees "we'll stock and support it for 10 years" for firms who need certifiable fixed platforms. Small volume but probably easy to get name-your-price margins.
t0mas88 1y ago
Anecdata, but looking at the higher end of the "normal people" market Intel has already lost. It's macbooks everywhere. The only non-apple notebooks I see are either for cost reasons or tech experts that want more contol (a small group) And Apple is silently reducing prices by making the cheap Macbook Air close in specs to the Pro. So they're likely to start taking more and more of the midrange market as well.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > The only non-apple notebooks I see are either for cost reasons or tech experts that want more contol (a small group) You forgot gamers. I know plenty of people with beefy and expensive notebooks that are not Apple.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    How big is the "gamer" market really? How much is it set to grow? Are "gamers" really going to be buying the high margin kit from Intel or are they going to instead spend their money with Nvidia on the beefiest GPUs? Even today a mid-tier CPU is way more than enough to handle even the most demanding games so long as you've got a beefy CPU. Over the past twenty years games have demanded far more in the way of GPUs than they have in CPUs. That market doesn't make Intel zero dollars or anything but I don't really see it a market that's going to drive a bunch of growth in Intel's revenue or specifically their margins. Long gone are the days where buying the Extreme Edition CPU got some appreciable extra performance in games.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      > How big is the "gamer" market really? How much is it set to grow? Are "gamers" really going to be buying the high margin kit from Intel I was saying that more about your argument about Apple products. I don't think Intel benefits from the gamer segment, my point is only that there is a significant segment that donown computers and that segment has no interest in Apple notebooks. In fact, basically everyone I know that owns a laptop has a laptop primarily to play games, not macbooks.

hedora 1y ago

Presumably, they’ll need to abandon cloud and hyperscalers too. That leaves legacy enterprise. (ARM or AMD are going to have better $/perf, and be closer to the dev workstations/laptops, so the only thing Intel would have left is inertia.) If they actually execute this strategy, sales implode and the CEO is gone. If they don’t, he demonstrated he can’t set policy, so he’s gone.

hakfoo 1y ago

Perhaps they're looking at specific empty slots in the competitive product lineup and doubling-down there. I'm sort of surprised, for example, that LTS embedded is not more of a thing. Sell something like those little N50/100/150 mini-PCs, (or more likely an ITX mainboard with the same specs) but for an astronomical price and guarantees "we'll stock and support it for 10 years" for firms who need certifiable fixed platforms. Small volume but probably easy to get name-your-price margins.

t0mas88 1y ago

Anecdata, but looking at the higher end of the "normal people" market Intel has already lost. It's macbooks everywhere. The only non-apple notebooks I see are either for cost reasons or tech experts that want more contol (a small group) And Apple is silently reducing prices by making the cheap Macbook Air close in specs to the Pro. So they're likely to start taking more and more of the midrange market as well.

surgical_fire 1y ago
> The only non-apple notebooks I see are either for cost reasons or tech experts that want more contol (a small group) You forgot gamers. I know plenty of people with beefy and expensive notebooks that are not Apple.
- giantrobot 1y ago
  How big is the "gamer" market really? How much is it set to grow? Are "gamers" really going to be buying the high margin kit from Intel or are they going to instead spend their money with Nvidia on the beefiest GPUs? Even today a mid-tier CPU is way more than enough to handle even the most demanding games so long as you've got a beefy CPU. Over the past twenty years games have demanded far more in the way of GPUs than they have in CPUs. That market doesn't make Intel zero dollars or anything but I don't really see it a market that's going to drive a bunch of growth in Intel's revenue or specifically their margins. Long gone are the days where buying the Extreme Edition CPU got some appreciable extra performance in games.
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    > How big is the "gamer" market really? How much is it set to grow? Are "gamers" really going to be buying the high margin kit from Intel I was saying that more about your argument about Apple products. I don't think Intel benefits from the gamer segment, my point is only that there is a significant segment that donown computers and that segment has no interest in Apple notebooks. In fact, basically everyone I know that owns a laptop has a laptop primarily to play games, not macbooks.