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By Dan Moren for Macworld
Why Intel’s problem won’t be Apple’s problem
Let’s talk about chips. I’ve always been a pita chip fan, frankly; not that your kettle-cooked potato chips don’t have their appea—
Sorry, must be lunchtime. Let’s talk about processors.
This week, Intel announced that it was laying off 12,000 employees. If you’re not the type to keep a close eye on the industry, that might come as a surprise, but it’s been clear for a while that Intel missed the boat on the largest revolution to hit Silicon Valley in the past decade: the move to mobile.
Take a look at the most popular mobile devices around—the iPhone, the iPad, Samsung’s Android phones, even Amazon’s Fire tablet—and you’ll notice they all have something in common: none of them use Intel processors. You can argue about why Intel missed this sea change, but the fact remains that it did, and it’s scrambling to make up for that lost ground.
But this puts Apple in a peculiar position. While the majority of devices that the company sells are now based on chips of Apple’s own design, it still has one long-running product line that relies on Intel: the Mac.