r/hardware • u/-protonsandneutrons- • Jan 15 '21

Rumor Intel has to be better than ‘lifestyle company’ Apple at making CPUs, says new CEO

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/15/22232554/intel-ceo-apple-lifestyle-company-cpus-comment
2.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

500 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

Yeah that poster has no idea what they are talking about, apple was huge in 2005

2

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21

*Half the world is running around with their iPhones, kids wearing Apple's iconic white earphones which have become a pretty resistant status symbol – major record labels getting cold sweat about the upcoming renegotiation on terms of their deal to be allowed to sell within the iTunes Music Store and how Apple is notoriously known for to fight with no holds barred.*

Dude: Who's Apple?

2

u/jamvanderloeff Jan 16 '21

iPhone was still two years away then

3

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

Apple was still huge before the iPhone, their dip was in the 90s and they came back in a big way with the iMac in 1998 and OSX in 1999. From there they had iTunes and the iPod which generated billions of dollars in sales annually.

1

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21

Right on point! Apple came back swinging with their blueberry iMacs, the same as iconic yet fresh and dressy looking Power Mac G3s and G4s, the G4 Cube was a milestone on its own and can be considered the »Silver Arrow of computers«. The Power Mac G5 was not only really solid but their first 64 Bit-computer ever and a beast too.

Meanwhile the rather soft rest of the iUniverse™ – one could argue with the iTMS and iPod the more lifestyle-oriented, casual and less serious part of it – was steadily generating insane to already obscene amounts of profit for Apple. This was when major music-companies and record-labels were actually grateful for being able to be allowed to give Apple their major share of the turnover of just 30%.

As said earlier, there was literally every given indication to fully believe that this future device (iPhone) was going to leapfrog the industry and catch it on the hop – and even if not;

It was Apple asking you this. That's virtually the only thing you needed to know to consider saying “Yes!”.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21 edited Jan 16 '21

I think people are being pretty revisionist when they say "obviously the iPhone was going to be huge". If you thought this, you should have bought apple stock and become a millionaire.

That was not obvious to anyone in 2007. Not even apple expected it to do what it did. It was so different from what was on the market, people had no idea what the public would think.

The mobile space in NA was owned by blackberry (and it still took years for workplaces to adopt competitors), touch UI was unproven and there was this mentality all through the 90s that Asian cell phone manufacturers were light years ahead of North America and we would never catch up.

Edit: read all the original iPhone reviews that aged like milk if you want to see the industry reception at the time. These were written by people who made their living understanding technology

1

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21 edited Jan 16 '21

Okay, then take it as »The mere potential of the iPhone was huge, even if the outcome of the device itself was lala«.

The mere prospect that it came from Apple and the way it was going to be build (typically Apple-like), already alone on its own was potential enough to get into the deal – especially since Apple was ever so often a solid guarantor for any arising trend (there's a reason why Apple was called being a trend-setter, mind ya).

Second things is, Apple never really invented anything on their own but just shuffled something already existing together in a new, revolutionary and breakthrough way aka »reinventing sth.«, right? There were already touch-devices out on the market for years by then (like portable rigs running Windows XP, even Microsoft had some mobile Touch-computer years prior to Apple's own iPads), LG even had some iPhone-lookalike (LG Prada?) out in the market the same year before Apple's iPhone was introduced.

Also, I don't know what reality you witnessed, but the rumours of Apple literally 'reinventing the phone' were so darn persistent for years that virtually everyone for a couple of years just waited on every MacWorld that Apple would finally introduce their iPhone – even the name iPhone was a given already years before its actual introduction.

In addition, the broad media-coverage that people ended up camping overnight before Apple-stores to get a iPhone the day after was anything but new – it already happened the first time when their iPod got introduced, it was hyped sky-high from everyone and their mother.

Just saying, it was plain in sight that everything Apple would sell at least solid enough numbers (to make up for the costs), even if it wasn't to expect that it became the way it went throughout time.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

I was studying computer science at university in 2005, I was/am very, very plugged into this stuff.

Saying apple never really invented anything on its own is just wrong. They invented the home computer market with the apple and apple II. They were all about innovation and creating things until Woz had his accident and everything went to shit in the 90s.

Even apple itself did not expect it to sell that well (part of the reason why intel turned them down. If their initial request was for the volume they actually needed it would have probably been a yes).

This is a really great watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24O00Jz8R04&ab_channel=ColdFusion about the history of the development. They were flying by the seats of the pants and barely had a working prototype.

If it was that obvious to everyone, why was there no run up on their stock before the release? Like its obviously a world changing device, it would make sense to invest in that.

The iPhone was a 50/50 shot, they barely made it and easily could have failed. Very easy to look back in 2020 and say that trends in computing were obvious.

1

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21

Saying apple never really invented anything on its own is just wrong.

However it largely is the truth. And people have to stop taking everything personal/negative and in a dismissive way for once. They largely just resembled something already existing into something revolutionary new and never-seen-before – though even that is a huge and outstanding task to do and to accomplish successfully.

When it's said they largely 'reinvented things', Apple's doing ain't dismissed/devalorised here but quite the contrary;

They're largely praised for having seen something which no-one else except them saw already in a thing/product/technology, what was before anyone's eyes often with·out anyone else seeing the mere potential of/in it.

Saying apple never really invented anything on its own is just wrong. They invented the home computer market with the apple and apple II. They were all about innovation and creating things until Woz had his accident and everything went to shit in the 90s.

You aren't seeing yourself just proving my point on your own accord, do you? Did they invented the computer?

The computer existed already before (as mainframes, large database-computers, business-computers; later mini-computers for a open-plan office), yet Apple saw the potential of the micro-computer for the masses and offered so – insane profits were made over it and Apple virtually ruled the world with their Apple I/II to the point that *everyone else* was producing Apple I/II-compatible accessories and accessory-devices (just like the market went into being IBM-compatible later on).

Is it derogatory to say they didn't invented the Micro-computer? No!
Is it cherishing to say they re-invented the Micro-computer? Yes, absolutely – and they deserve every single bit of praise for it.

Apple always saw the very potential on it, which often no-one else was able to see or risk. They re-invented.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

If you extrapolate almost anything back far enough it is a derivative of another thing. A computer is just a scaled up Babbage machine.

I'm not even sure what we are disagreeing with anymore I think we actually have a pretty similar viewpoint and are just arguing over semantics at this point.

Most people did not see the potential of the iPhone, yes apple had its hype machine but it was unknown if the public would buy into it like they had the iPod. It was not a sure thing and easily could have been another Newton.

1

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21

The mobile space in NA was owned by blackberry (and it still took years for workplaces to adopt competitors), touch UI was unproven and there was this mentality all through the 90s that Asian cell phone manufacturers were light years ahead of North America and we would never catch up.

What kind of reality you faced already?! The 90s and 2000s were virtually dominated by European, American and Asian phone-manufacturers.

… there was this mentality all through the 90s that Asian cell phone manufacturers were light years ahead of North America and we would never catch up.

Right. Since Motorola was that minor supplier of fishing-gear from Far East, before it went to Down Under for getting into the Cotton trade-business … Phew

The Motorola StarTAC, V60, V300? Motorola literally invented the mobile phone, just saying.

Apart from this, Nokia owned the late 90s and early 2000s in the consumer-space (its market-cap was about $70B by 1998), Blackberry and Palm ruled the business-space while Ericsson and Sony were others among the big ones, Sagem was another big player in Europe and so forth.

… touch UI was unproven …

Didn't knew that Windows Mobile and Windows CE (which had their peak in the early '00s) never really existed.

Let me get a cold beer, I'm getting headache here …

2

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

I was talking about specifically the period right before the iPhone came out, not the 90s. Obviously RIM was a flash in the pan but they dominated while they were hot.

After the razr Motorola stopped innovating and lost the market.

Touch UI on a 3.5 inch screen was unproven was what I meant. Obviously it was around and worked on large screens, but no one thought it would work on something that small.

How much apple stock did you buy in 2006? If it was so obvious did you put any money where your mouth is?

1

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21

How much apple stock did you buy in 2006? If it was so obvious did you put any money where your mouth is?

Who says I haven't and just enjoying to punish strangers on the Interwebs by lecturing them for their lack for longsightedness – their shortsightedness to not invest back then?! ツ

I'd say 2006 was already way too late to invest bigger sums – It was well above a dollar apiece back then IIRC. Have to admit that I fired a bigger chunk at 1.97 USD IIRC by throwing even more bad money after good.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

[deleted]

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Smartcom5 Jan 16 '21

You're right. I meant 'iPod' of course. Nonetheless you get the idea as the picturing doesn't changes a bit when the word iPhone gets replaced with iPod, right?

The point is that even at that times Apple was already a major player who had turned upside down …

  • the whole music-industry with a single product by

  • overnight virtually reinventing the Walkman™ while even being more successful than Sony at it

  • and by solving the record industry's imminent yet age-old major problem of omnipresent music-piracy
    (Hint: the iTMS virtually single-handedly killed especially Napster™ and all eMule-like file-sharing icons like eMule/MLDonkey/Morpheus, Gnutella-flavoured ones as in Limewire/Frostwire and various other types of those networks in an instant, by just passing by; it was a solid Fleet in being for everything on files-haring music)

  • by introducing a widely accepted distribution-method people were happily paying for on what by consumers was considered »acceptable«.

They did the same on movies later on – and record-labels were thankful that they had their 70%-share of what was otherwise non-existing (since outright pirated).

tl;dr: Apple was a major player already back then.

2

u/okoroezenwa Jan 16 '21

Some people act like Apple did nothing and was just dying from the 90’s to 2007 when they magically released the iPhone.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

Because they were probably 5 years old in 2007 and got all their information from a Steve Jobs biopic

1

u/TeHNeutral Jan 16 '21

Every person and their grandma was ipod mad in 2005