Alphane_Moon

Having a captive audience and government mandate creates its own set of benefits and disincentives.

Would be interesting to see how their iGPU performs compared to top iGPUs from 5-7 years ago.

This was just a glib, off-hand remark on my part.

Corporate PR copytext (not only Apple) often includes lyrical polemical poetry about power of markets and so on (like how requiring USB-C charging is an attempt to subvert innovation).

And then you have price competition - arguably a fundamental element of markets.

So in my mind, I imagined the Apple executives speaking to each other in a overly posh Victorian accent:

What is this foul marxist-leninist price competition these smelly plebs are demanding? Since when did they decide they have a right to speak?

Nothing more and nothing less. 😆

To be fair, it is not a £50 product.

Price competitiveness leads to race to the bottom. Outside of the 90s Apple whole brand has been the exact opposite of race to the bottom. Plus making a cheaper “good enough” device makes it much harder to justify also having the more expensive and profitable device.

But isn't that the core of free market thought (the more conceptual variant, not the polemical variant). Thousands of companies fighting for every last minuscule hundredth of a percentage point of margin. Optimal intersection of supply and demand requiring both multiple competing producers and of course hundreds of millions of consumers.

My comment was somewhat glib, I admit. But I do think the framing in the article is interesting.

New FTC (circa Jan 20) will require that you buy a new device each time you want a software update.

You're joking, but it's not unreasonable to assume an oligarch-run regime (nothing to do with US or Trump specifically) is going to leverge its power to get kickbacks and benefits for their own gang and partner gangs.

This will realistically drive up the prices of such devices.

Don't get me wrong, I would support such an initiative. If you can't afford the device (with the cost of 7 year security fix support), you should probably not get the device. However, I am thinking more about the political component of implementing such a rule (if it would even be possible in the US).

I love how that Apple executives are portrayed as “detesting” the notion of a price competition.

It makes sense from a margins perspective and from a brand power perspective (people seeing the Apple brand as intro status symbol of sorts), just funny to see alleged capitalists being so repulsed by price competition.

I posted the headline as-is. Updated it with the new headline.

But the main thing is this while story is some bizarre idea that a new device getting nearly 1% of global sales in its first quarter is doing badly?

There was a lot of hype for this and some sketchy work by Qualcomm around benchmarks (initially posted benchmarks that were based on a linux setup with 100% custom cooling, none of the released products came close to this result and it's not really viable to run Linux on Snapdragon X devices even to this day).

• Ars Technica - Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite looks like the Windows world’s answer to Apple Silicon
• The Verge - Qualcomm’s next round of PC chips will fight Apple under the name Snapdragon X
• Tomshardware - Snapdragon X Elite Outperforms Intel, AMD, Apple CPUs (In Vendor Benchmarks)

And the funny thing was the first, rather impressive, Geekbench 6 benchmarks that Qualcomm revealed were for Linux (the results did not represent real world performance).

But the transaction faced numerous financial, regulatory and operational hurdles, including the assumption of Intel’s more than $50 billion in debt. It likely would have drawn a lengthy and arduous antitrust review, including in China, which is a key market for both companies.

Qualcomm would have had to handle Intel’s money-losing semiconductor manufacturing unit, a business where it has no experience.

Sounds like Qualcomm got a little bit ahead of itself during their initial inquiries about acquiring Intel.