"The reductions instead will be achieved through attrition, buyouts and early retirement offers.", says the Post. "Intel’s financial performance is faltering because the company didn’t adapt quickly enough as the growing popularity of smartphones and tablet computers undercut sales of PCs running on its chips. Worldwide PC sales have dropped from the previous year in seven consecutive quarters, an unprecedented decline." So, as you update your
The Washington Post reports Intel will eliminated 5,000 jobs are PC's in trouble?
Answers
I think the PC business that relies on people spending $200 on a $35 processor is in trouble. But that has nothing to do with Apple vs. PC. It used to be that laptops were not strong enough to do everything you needed, and thus many people had a desktop and a laptop. Well, that's not true any more and it hasn't been for probably 5 years or so. That means Intel is selling far fewer desktop class chips. And now, with the advent of tablets, you have people trying to shoehorn their entire computing experience into a $400 tablet, with yet fewer dollars spent on a processor. So Intel takes a hit again on the top and bottom lines as tablets come roaring in. Thus, Intel is a casualty of their own success. Great processors do more for less, in ever less expensive hardware. They are being squeezed out.
Further, with the cloud, a lot of computing that used to be done on the machine in front of you is now done on a server somewhere, with only the display shooting back and forth over the internet. Thus, the need for power is actually decreasing in some applications.
As for Apple vs. PC, we use Macs at home and I use a PC at work. There are still some business apps you can only find for the PC, and even when software co's make for both platforms, the PC version has more features, more investment, and is generally better, in my experience. Thus tipping the balance towards PCs still for work. The whole PC vs. Mac user experience is a highly personal thing, and as much as I can't stand using Macs (I find them far harder to use than PCs since Windows 7 hit), my wife loves her Mac. So that, like Coke vs. Pepsi, may never be settled :).
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