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by galogon 1422 days ago
I still don't understand how Apple, a lifestyle company, managed to beat Intel at their own game. It must be humiliating for the employees and the execs. I wonder what the morale is inside the company.
6 comments

Apple isn't a lifestyle company. They're just a tech company that happens to use lifestyle marketing as their selling point. But even before they owned a chip design firm their key strength wasn't the marketing; it was superior UX design.

Or to paraphrase Papa Steve: the only problem with other tech companies is that they have no taste.

Related note: Intel was in the bidding process for the original iPhone chip and lost to Samsung, partially because Intel's chip was too expensive for their liking. Apple really expects its vendors to be able to take a haircut on unit pricing and make it back up in volume, which isn't exactly Intel's thing. Had Intel met Apple's requirements they may have dissuaded Apple from getting into chip design in the first place.

It’s this type of thinking is why Intel is in the mess they’re in.

Calling Apple a lifestyle company kind of diminishes the relentless innovation they’ve demonstrated for decades.

It reminds me how Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, Blackberry dismissed the iPhone in 2007. That didn’t turn out so good for them.

I’m old enough to remember when Intel was an ARM licensee… I’m sure there are some Intel engineers lamenting how all of this could have been different.

I don't understand where this "lifestyle" company thing is coming from?
Pat Gelsinger himself described Apple as a "lifestyle" company: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22232554/intel-ceo-apple-...
An uninformed or throwaway comment dismissing the second (?) Most valuable company by market cap on the plane?
And also AMD's market cap went above Intel's last week

Can we call this "the Nokia effect"?

The iPhone business sponsored Apple's chip development; and that business is bigger than the PC market.
If with "PC market" you're limiting that statement to pre-built personal computers, that's a misleading claim.

If you meant to refer to the entire computer hardware market, you're wrong by an order of magnitude.

iPhone Revenue 2021: $191.9 billion

Computer Hardware Revenue 2021: $1,129.39 billion

Comparing a market for devices to all of computer hardware (including peripherals/components) is what's ridiculous. The more apt analogy is computers (PCs) to iPhones.
Throwaway4good was using the comparison of iPhones to PCs to allude that Apple has more money available to develop silicon, yet the pre-built PC market is a tiny subset of where money is made using semiconductors.

That's why it's a misleading claim.

I didn't expect I would have to elaborate this beyond what I said. My bad.

Even a lifestyle company can buy a good CPU design team, if they have $billions.