[Eisenstein]

Apple was a few months from bankruptcy during most of the 90s competing with IBM and Microsoft, then turned around to become the most profitable company on the planet. It takes a leader and a plan and a lot of talent and the exact right conditions, but industry behemoths get pulled down from the top spot all the time.

[tracker1]

Apple's success is mostly UX and marketing with a walled garden for an application tax. AMD has to actually achieve on the hardware side, not just marketing. Beyond this, AMD has demonstrated that they are, indeed working on closing and pulling ahead. AMD is well ahead of Intel on the server CPU front, they're neck and neck on desktop, with spans ahead in the past few years. And on the GPU side, they've closed a lot of gaps.

While I am a little bit of a fan of AMD, there's still work to do. I think AMD really needs to take advantage of their production margins to gain more market share. They also need to get something a bit closer to the 4090 on a performance gpu + entry workstation api/gpgpu workload card. The 7900 XTX is really close, but if they had something with say 32-48gb vram in the sub-2000 space it would really get a lot of the hobbiest and soho types to consider them.

[elzbardico]

Yeah, sure, changing their platform 3 times in the space of some twenty years is just marketing and UX from Apple. They are just a bunch of MBAs. Sometimes I feel like I am reading slashdot.

[AnthonyMouse]

The platform changes had very little to do with their success. They switched from PowerPC to Intel because PowerPC was uncompetitive, but that doesn't explain why they did any better than Dell or anyone else using the exact same chips. Then they developed their own chips because Intel was stagnant, but they barely came out before AMD had something competitive and it's not obvious they'd have been in a meaningfully different position had they just used that.

Their hardware is good but if all they were selling was Macbooks and iPhones with Windows and Android on them, they wouldn't have anything near their current margins.

[robbiep]

You’re not really making sense.

If they hadn’t made platform changes they would have never been able to turn into what they are today. I hardly thing that is ‘little to do’.

They would likely barely exist. They have ‘achieved product market fit’ as the saying goes. Which requires more than just a sharp UI, as their history shows

[BeefWellington]

I think the point here is that their first platform shift onto x86/x86-64 was driven by how far Power had fallen behind. Even their fans were having difficulty justifying the slowness of their comparatively expensive computers.

It was more forced upon them than anything else.

The move to M1 was an actual innovation that came after their success.

The real story of the company though is the iPhone, which is absolutely their own technical innovation.

[jacquesm]

I would say the turning point was either the iPod or the rainbow Macs.

[tracker1]

I didn't say they didn't have technical prowess... I said that wasn't the key to their overall success. iPod/Phone/Pad came out ahead of competition with better UX than what, generally, came before. They marketed consistently and did it well. They built up buzz. They paid for placement throughout TV and Movies.

They are a brand first, and a technical company second. That doesn't mean they aren't doing cool technical things. But a lot of companies do cool technical things and still fail.