Reminds me of when an executive left our company and higher ups were rushing to assure us that we shouldn't be too worried and don't let this hurt morale while mostly we either didn't care or were kind of glad to see the idiot go. Meanwhile the execs speaking would get obviously angry at the guy for betraying them and leaving.

It was clear that day that the executives actually think we give a crap about any one of them.

Not knowing anything at all about Apple and Dye and Lemay, the story seems depressingly familiar and totally believable based on my experience with big companies.

Someone useless occupies a high position because he convinces peers he is somehow insightful, everyone hates him for his crappy 'leadership', his departure pisses off the leadership team so much that all his allies are dead to them.... Yep, all of this absolutely looks like things I've seen at other companies...

Nope, they are going the other way. There's a proposal to dramatically increase residential power rates, in part to fund the 'increased demand due to datacenters". They want residents to pay for stuff instead of making those poor, cash-strapped AI companies have to pay for what they are inflicting...

Not a weirdo, and it's all about their business interests against the users.

A user increasingly keeps their device over a longer term, 8 year old devices are common. Between their needs not evolving and to the extent they are, they focus on their phones. As a result, Microsoft gets thrown a few dollars by the OEM when the device sold, and that's it.

Meanwhile, if they get someone into a microsoft account, they can upsell them on subscriptions to office and onedrive, and easily make more money per user per year than they made from many of those users over a decade.

Ingress NGINX controller is being retired.

A viable, maintained alternative is NGINX Ingress Controller.... Totally different project....

To make his suggestion at *least* vaguely closer to reasonable, even if not there, could just say text will be in the phonetic scripts. So maybe not Kanji, but sure, Hiragana and Katakana.

If it is true that no one will reasonably provide fonts for cheap to cover the thousands of Kanji, you could still be in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.

I had heard that conceptually, they couldn't find a benefit for having the FPGA on-package but it was a big thermal/power challenge. So the integrated case was actually worse.

On the Omnipath side, similar story though they actually shipped a version... It got watered down to PCI-e attached even while on-package and so it was just a pain with zero benefit for being on-package. Very weird board/cooling design needed to let cable go straight to CPU, having to share the TDP budget between the loosely logically coupled, but tightly physically coupled functions...

But yeah, Intel doesn't seem to know what to do except processors, and they've squandered even that by now...

Particularly striking as they started from a pretty solid premise, that mismanagement broadly is the cause. Especially citing Boeing, which was *well* documented that the changes can be traced back to acquiring McDonnel Douglas, which was ripe for the taking after being mismanaged into failure and Boeing having the genius idea that the best thing they can do with a leadership team that tanked their former company is to put them in charge of the still viable Boeing. People who wanted to scream DEI pointed to DEI initiatives that started *after* the troubled MAX program was already in the air.

I wager engineers are willing to agree, as they see their work as solid but the business mismanaging things to make good engineering infeasible.

"We (the broader company) doesn't know how to engineer, but *I* still do" I could easily imagine being the takeaway. I think most of us can relate to being part of a broader mismanaged whole.

I'd say the big thing is they took their core product as granted, and focused a great deal of their income on almost anything else, aiming/hoping for some horizontal growth instead of investing to preserve their processor market share. Intel is flush with cash and could either invest in CPUs, or, say, buy McAfee, a brand that had lost most of it's value a decade prior. Or maybe acquire some HPC products to try to build an in-house all-in-one HPC solution to compete with their partners, then decide that was a bad idea and mostly abandon that expensive effort. Or maybe buy an ethernet switch chip company, and then promptly do nothing with it. Since it worked out so swimmingly the first time, do the exact same thing with another ethernet switch chip company and again just shrug and never do anything with it. Maybe spend a boat load of money trying to make "Optane" a thing, including heavy evangelizing to try to convince people to fundamentally rework core concepts of how they work to justify the apparently awkward in-between of PCM which was never going to be as fast as SDRAM nor as cheap as NAND. Along the way spend money on all sorts of weird random projects someone had without any target customer expressing interest in the hopes they stumble upon some unexpected Model T moment in a new market segment.

Intel just assumed their position in the market was unassailable and went about trying to start *something* else because protecting their core business wouldn't deliver adequate growth (they pretty much had the market cornered). So you have a lot of big 'lottery ticket' investments with inconsistent execution on top of dubious justifications in the first place. They failed to coalesce around a common accelerator/GPU strategy leaving them critically disadvantaged compared to AMD and nVidia, their CPUs surpassed by AMD, their fabs long passed by TSMC and none of their gambles paid off, so now they are just boned. I suppose on the upside, *now* they have growth opportunity in their core competency since they ceded so much ground...

Funny, today I was forced to deal with a phone tree system that wanted to hang up on me at any whiff of a plausible path to hang up.

Point being that even without LLM magic, they have already been making it supremely hard to get things done. The old standby of hitting zero or saying representative over and over again would not budge this system. I thought for sure when I got it to prompt for payment information and if I screwed that up, *surely* that would escalate to a human, surely they want my money. Nope, hung up when I failed to provide the payment info in a timely fashion either.

If they went 150% yesterday, and another 150% today, then within a month they will have stockpiled all the RAM in the world.

I'm saying they may not be given the same offers that the suppliers were formerly giving them. If a supplier sees that nVidia will absolutely buy a huge supply of memory, then they will demand a comparable commitment from other customers. They will divert capacity to the customers that are willing to make the biggest and most certain commitments.

So Lenovo may have had to commit to bigger orders, or just be left out of getting enough to keep shipping their systems at all. If supply is constrained *someone's* orders are getting delayed, and the bigger orders get priority.

To the extent it might be a gamble, it could be a very short term gamble. Companies try to adhere to 'just in time' supply chain and carry very little advance supply, since investors heavily penalize carrying any sort of inventory over time. So as one example put it, maybe they extended stock from 30 days to 45 days, assuming that the memory market won't get better for at least a couple of months, which may be what the suppliers are forecasting.

The point is to explicitly extend android to be more 'laptop/desktopy'. So it's still a linux distribution, and looks like it won't be *really* distinct from Android....

They might not have had a choice. The memory vendors getting sweetheart deals from AI supply chain might require other markets to increase their commitment or get nothing.

So the choices might be either stockpile or not have any supply at all for their mainstream product. It's worth a risk of overpaying for memory when you have no other viable option.