The irony in your comment is astonishing. As is the other guy calling me a "fanboy" for pointing out reality (the surest sign you're talking to a so-called fanboy is that they'll always declare others fanboys).

Fun fact - Intel shares are off 2.5% today. That's despite riding at a tiny 11 P/E ratio, so investors already have a pretty grim outlook. Apple is up 1%. LOL.

Client computer (desktops and laptops) accounts for the bulk of Intel's revenue. PC sales are flat already, AMD is roaring, and suddenly Apple drops a bunch. It isn't looking good.

Data center revenue consumes the bulk of the remainder. Amazon is going all in on Graviton2. Google just heavily committed to AMD. Intel used to own this market and now it is under serious threat.

Everything else -- Optane, IoT, software, networking, chipsets, is a relatively small business comparatively. It'd be a huge business for many other firms, but it's small compared to Intel's beachhead.

At the same time, Intel is years out of data on chip fabs and is making extraordinarily little progress. Their fabs are close to anchors rather than assets now.

The GPU comment gave me a laugh. Intel has had a stalking horse GPU promise for literally two decades now. Always grossly overpromised, massively undelivered. There is no one who expects Intel to do anything credible in that realm anymore.

I don't remember anyone saying Intel was dead at any point. But never has it felt more precarious: Intel was so pathetically desperate to hold onto x86 and to forcefully segment their own products (crippling their own offerings lest they impede the huge margin high end) that they ate the seed for the next season.

Apple accounts for 6% of the PC market, was 100% Intel in that market, and used almost entirely premium products. Neither company reports these specific numbers, but there is no analysis that has them as a minor customer.

What is Intel going to pivot to?

-Intel is simply dead in mobile and connected/IoT devices. They tried and failed miserably

-the PC market is shrinking even before you slice 6% off

-AMD is going absolutely gangbusters, and in many estimates is now outselling Intel to retail customers

-Intel's sole remaining cash cow, data centers, is seeing Google making their own processor, Amazon making their own processor (the Gravitron 2 is looking stellar), and now the top supercomputer in the world is an ARM based machine. AMD is back in play in the supercomputer market as well with a new Epyc entrant.

-All of this has caused Intel to slash their top tier product pricing

Intel might do okay with Optane as they scale it up and out, though their window of opportunity for that is crashing. Their other major cash cow is chipsets and motherboards, though that's contingent on you using their CPU.

I always expected Intel to dominate whatever realm they entered, but things are looking pretty grim.

Apple accounts for >5% of Intel's revenue (on a purely processor basis the number is a good deal higher). That actually makes them a very big fish if not the biggest fish. Indeed, Apple has been rolling out Intel chips before anyone else as Intel gives them first dibs.

But yes, Apple is a "control freak". They don't like their product roadmap being dictated by Intel's delays, including that Intel is still at 14nm while everyone else is at 7 and are already pushing down to 5. And if they can provide similar or better performance and efficiency with their own designs, in what universe would they choose otherwise?

"In a few years (or less) Apple will have some flimsy excuse for switching away from ARM."

What does this even mean? Ignoring the hilarious "or less" bit, in the future the world will be different and hopefully the company can adapt as they have before. That's life. Arguing otherwise would be incredibly stupid.

How does the change of processor affect repairability at all? Zero people are getting the Intel processor replaced on their Mac motherboard: They're replacing the whole system board. This will be an identical process for both chips.

The point clearly being that they were aware of the outbreak and were taking precautions.

Again, what is your point? This German study claims that close to no viruses are expelled, and that only constant, close, intimate contact will lead to transmission. We know, via tens of thousands of cases, that such is absolute bullshit. In this particular case do you think the single infected individual walked around singing into everyone's face?

Or, as I suspect, you just felt like arguing. Cool.

The choir used hand sanitizer, kept a distance, and didn't engage in any physical contact. While there were no known cases in this area, they still had it on their mind.

And it wasn't one, two, or even four people who got sick. >80% of the choir got sick, and from an epidemiological perspective it is presumed that all caught it from one (unsymptomatic) member at this practice.

Whether initial exposure correlates with disease severity is uncertain right now, however evidence points to it not being a significant factor. The influenza is a relatively slow replicating virus, so if you start with a large number of infected cells, and they replicate exponentially, it has more of a chance to peak before the immune system deals with it. SARS-CoV-2 is a fast replication virus that doesn't initiate an immune system response for some time -- sometimes well over a week. People who have a high viral load at that point are generally sicker, of course, but that says nothing to what the beginning exposure was.

Many people have died while having no contacts with known infection. Whole groups, practicing safe distancing, have come down with the disease. The Skagit Valley choir case is a perfect example that completely contradicts this German research: They had a rehearsal during the initial outbreak. No one was actively sick. No one was sneezing, coughing, or showing any symptoms. They met, had a choir practice, and dispersed. Then harsher guidelines came in effect and they had no further in person contact.

45 of the 60 people became ill with COVID-19. 2 of them died. With casual, limited contact.

"Compared with Italy the estimate of 0.4% does not seem far off at all"

Italy's estimated IFR is between 0.7% - 1.1%, which is significantly higher.

"The hospitals are in a weird state in Germany at the moment."

Germany's CFR went from 0.35% three weeks ago, to 0.75% two weeks ago, to 1.5% a week ago (5 days ago), to 2.3% today. Germany was late to see a major outbreak, but it seems to be kicking in now.

During this outbreak there have been moments when everyone points to some country or other and marvels at what magic they are doing to avoid calamity. Two weeks ago it was Sweden, everyone pointing out that they had no government mandated shut downs, etc. Sweden now has 3x the deaths of Canada despite being 1/3 the size, and is continuing at a higher pace. The point being that we can't really draw many conclusions until this has run its course.

They can't even demonstrate that they are detecting SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, and were doing this study before any proven antibody test was even available. It is possible, if not probable, that they are simply detecting exposure to *any* coronavirus, many of which make the rounds during the winter.

They claim surface tests conclusions that go completely contrary to every other study to the same.

They claim exposure conclusions go in absolute contrast with every bit of evidence in the field (e.g. the CDC now says this has an R0 of 5.7, which makes the premise that you need close, confined exposure to an infected person absolutely bonkers).

Then they released a 2 page summary and did a press release, with a professional PR firm backing them up.

This is the dirtiest research yet in this sad debacle. WORSE, they are telling the government to remove restrictions because of their completely unvalidated, unproven, absurdly-contradictory results.

This researcher absolutely deserves to be disparaged. This is as garbage science as garbage science can get.

Are you talking about TN visas under NAFTA? Those are a very different thing from H1B visas. NAFTA TN visas were designated with the term "Systems analyst", and being a programmer can get you rejected on either side of the border.

This article is a sort of saving of face because recall during the debacle there were poorly supported claims (via leading online surveys) that every Note 7 user was marching right to their nearest Apple store to buy an iPhone.