No modern IDE either. Nor a modern Linux desktop environment either (they are not that much more memory efficient than Macos or windows). Yes you can work with not much more than a text editor. But why?
That's a bizarrely extreme position. For almost everyone ~$2000-3000 PC from several years ago is indistinguishable from one they can buy now from a productivity standpoint. Nobody is talking about $25 ten year old smartphones. Of course claiming that a $500 laptop is sufficient is also a severe exaggeration, a used desktop, perhaps...
Both are objectively true, though. IFS would finally stand on it's own legs with a customer at Apple's scale, and Intel has the required IP and know-how to provide a stopgap RISC chip to embedded and datacenter customers that Apple usually ignores.
The "nightmare scenario" of Apple buying out the entirety of 14A to fabricate ARM chips is more-or-less what Pat Gelsinger spent his tenure trying to arrange.
Why would Intel design and make a RISC-V chips? Fundamentally they don't have any inherent advantages over x86 or ARM whatsoever(for datacenter atleast). It makes no sense for Intel to make embedded chips on 14A or non several generations old process either (margins on them are pitiful anyway and won't sustain Intel R&D spending).
Also x86 provides a huge moat to Intel/AMD which allows them to charge much higher prices than if they had to compete with anyone else.
Do we know that, though? Historically the lives of most people were bleak and miserable. You don't really have much time to feel depressed when you have to work for 14 hours in a factory 6 days a week or lose your home and eventually die in the streets due to malnutrition and disease. People who couldn't take care of themselves and didn't have a support network just didn't live that long and/or were entirely erased from history...
> if it's good enough for him it's good enough for you
Strange argument. e.g. Warren Buffet allegedly doesn't even have a computer.
Most people don't really have a team of assistants and other subordinates extracting and processing all of the information they might need to make high level decisions. And I'm pretty sure the employees doing that are generally using actual computers rather than tablets for most stuff.
> The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
Your point reads as pro Cook to me. We got hardware that decreased obsolescence.
If anything I’d be pissed if Cook was out and the new CEO’s strategy involved making chips that needed upgrades every other year again. Or if they were like, “Macs don’t sell well, let’s cancel the product line.”
I don't necessarily see any reason to attribute this specific outcome to Cook, though. But from a stockholder perspective this is a bit mixed.
Of course Macs are still very profitable compared to what PC makers are making. Now they share a lot of the hardware and software stack with iPad/iPhone. So it shouldn't be too costly to maintain. And well Apple's entire ecosystem is built on them anyway. It's not like anyone besides masochists would consider actually developing apps on iPads...
Yeah, I suppose there was a point he had to sign off on the decision so there is that. Hard to say if his role amounted to anything more than that (maybe it did).
> judged by outcomes
In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over what was probably the company's darkest period (remains to be seen of course) and the situation was reasonably stable when he took over. Is he the one to blame for all of it?
Brian Krzanich was the primary architect of Intel's demise. A huge amount of Intel's problems stem from opting to go with DUV rather than EUV light source for lithography, and this decision was made during Krzanich's tenure. This may have stemmed from Krzanich's lack of technical expertise. Gelsinger was brought in to fix things, but the board of directors got uncomfortable with the amount of money required to fix the problem.
It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.
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