paulpan

How far they've grown from Steve Jobs' "never be afraid to self-cannibalize" mentality.

Feels like the wrong approach. Why not just create a docking station for the iPad and a software docking view? Identical to Google's approach with the Pixel Tablet but Apple's superior will be more refined. It even uses the A18 SoC!

At $299 this feels like a very niche product with limited functionality.

Hugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.

It's the exact parallel of how it'll play out for U.S. automakers: destined for irrelevance given their inability or unwillingness to compete against China in the EV market. Instead they pretend EVs are bad and cry for protectionist policies.

The sad fact here is that OpenAI and Anthropic are only looking for a max 1-year runway (Anthropic's is only a few months away) so that they can IPO and their VC investors cash out immensely. They do not care about AI safety or fairness, only to appease their VC overlords. But the public is being lied to and pitched this narrative that "open weight AI models are all bad".

Pat was seemed to understand the criticality of fabrication process lead in today's day and age. Hence his push and decision to invest in IFS, plus to win over the government funding to sustain the effort.

In short, a bad or subpar chip design/architecture can be masked by having the chip fabricated on a leading edge node but not the inverse. Hence everyone is vying for capacity on TSMC's newest nodes - especially Apple in trying to secure all capacity for themselves.

Disagree on "failed on GPU" as it depends on the goal.

Sure Intel GPUs are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD flagship offerings, but they're competitive at a price-to-performance ratio. I'd argue for a 1st gen product, it was quite successful at opening up the market and enabling for cross-selling opportunities with its CPUs.

That all said, I suspect the original intent was to fabricate the GPUs on IFS instead of TSMC in order to soak up idle capacity. But plans changed along the way (for likely performance reasons) and added to the IFS's poor perception.

Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is delayed.

Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.

Agree with OP that Intel was probably too deep into its downward spiral. While it seems Pat tried to make changes, including expanding into GPUs, it either wasn't enough or too much for the Intel board.

Splitting Intel is necessary but probably infeasible at this point in the game. Simple fact is that Intel Foundry Services has nothing to offer against the likes of TSMC and Samsung - perhaps only cheaper prices and even then it's unproven to fab any non-Intel chips. So the only way to keep it afloat is by continuing to fab Intel's own designs, until 18A node becomes viable/ready.

> Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this.

I think you're giving Apple too much credit. They are too myopic and too focused on optimizing their current financials, especially under Tim Cook. To build a new search engine would mean 1) tossing away the $20B Google offers, and 2) spend potentially billions to build or acquire something viable.

Would be unacceptable to the Apple institutional shareholders. Akin to what Meta tried to do with their Reality Labs.

At $20 USD/month for the Ultimate tier, the service seems overpriced and no longer the value proposition it had when first launched for $12/month.