The Six Five team discusses Intel and the “Apple Spell”.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: So, Hey, let’s move forward. This next one is kind of the dessert of the show. And this has been a lot of fun. I mean as you know, Intel pretty much today public abandonment of Intel out there, to focus on their own M1 Silicon. And it’s been nice to see what I consider a truth-telling that Intel has been doing. And Intel came out with their second generation of their positioning work which we’re calling Intel dispelling the Apple spell.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And by the way, I’m still hung up on you wearing a coat. I don’t know about all that, but I actually have to speak at a conference on Monday and I’m going to… I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Patrick Moorhead: Daniel, who are you speaking with again?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So thanks for letting me plug that Pat, but I’m speaking at the channel companies. If you maybe know Sierra and they’re best of breed conference talking about the shortage and what caused the semiconductor shortage, what’s being done, and I’m going to be speaking alongside us. IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, HPE CEO, Antonio Neri. I go first, I go first. So, I’m the warmup act, but I’m very excited to be there. It’s going to be a lot of fun, even if it does mean traveling on a Sunday,
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t know Daniel. I’ve been to a lot of concerts when I was younger and sometimes the opening act is the preferred act. So I’m expecting you to bring it.
Daniel Newman: Mine will be a little fun, Pat. It’ll be a lot of story. We’ve told a few times about how we got into this mess. And sometimes I think about the world that everybody knows that what’s going on with chips, but then I realized that we know this so well because we live this every single day. Speaking of chips, all right. The final topic, the final topic. Okay. So Intel, Pat… A lot of people probably saw the Justin Long campaign loved that campaign received a little criticism for how much I love that campaign because, well, it doesn’t really matter how good someone does a compete campaign with Apple. There’s always going to be people that are just going to tell you it’s stupid because Apple people are just… They’re actually out right now trying to go buy an Apple car.
Anyway, but Intel being more realistic is looking at that broader market and the opportunity and saying, can we do some things that are really innovative that Apple still doesn’t do. Now, full disclaimer, you and I are both super critics of M1. We thought it would take a long time. Apple did a little better than I thought in terms of getting M1 optimized, but Intel still doing so many innovative things. And their OEMs are able to really pivot off that, whether that’s dual screen, whether that’s your flexible notebooks, detachables, touch. I mean, my God Apple, get it, gather, put a touch screen on your Mac. I know why you don’t do it, because you don’t want to stop selling iPads, but for crying out loud. So anyways, this was like a real people campaign. They were paid, but they had full option to opt in or opt out.
And essentially, this was done as kind of a in a marketing traditional way where people were brought into a room, they were shown something, with an unbranded standpoint and they were asked how excited they would be about it. They thought they were seeing features that were going to come out in a new Apple, turns out what they were really being shown as features that have been available in some cases for some time on Intel devices. And a lot of them just being blown away. I thought it was pretty clever. I thought it was something that I think just needs to keep being hammered home. I think Apple fans will think it’s dumb. They will always think it’s dumb. So Intel cannot make a decision on how it markets based on how Apple fans are going to operate. If I’m being critical in any way or that campaign.
Some of the features I think were hard to believe that not everybody already knew, but this also Pat is where I say I’m in a vacuum of being a guy that has 40 laptops in my office that gets to play with tons of technology all the time. And sometimes I forget that even people who are prosumers that really know tech may not be as connected to it as we are. But Pat, you know what? Look, Intel has been a company that has had the benefit for a very long time of having very significant market share. At times that has kept them somewhat humble. Maybe not being aggressive enough when companies like AMD and Apple have made moves that have been somewhat difficult on the company’s longer-term prospects. I like seeing Intel coming out with a little humor, a little aggressive posture. Like I said, I love the Justin Long stuff, because it was playful, it was fun. Yes, it picked an Apple, but why not? It’s not a common.
It wasn’t ill or nefarious. It was just fun. And so this one was a little more technical. It was hitting the spots that Intel knows it’s got strength and its platform and its wide variety of products. But having said that, like I said it’s going to be met with mixed reviews. It was met with mixed reviews. The real question for Intel, will they sell more client PC chips because of this campaign? That’s what it’s all about. We won’t know for a few months, but the Apple spell, at least for a few people, may have been dispelled. And as we keep seeing it, people will realize, the best innovation, really isn’t being done at Apple.
Patrick Moorhead: Certainly not in MacBook, so and I would even pose at the iPhone, watch scalar.
Daniel Newman: Well, I get in trouble for saying that, by the way. The best innovations, I mean, knowing an Apple. So we not parsed that out and quote it?
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t know. I mean, you and I showed up on some people’s hit lists on our coverage on the M1. We even had a.
Daniel Newman: I got the, yeah, the Apple lope or what was his name? Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, no, it was great. Listen, I’m going to jump right in and I saw some of the criticisms. But you know it’s funny, Daniel is old, there’s only a few things good about being an OG. And that’s, you’ve seen things behind and you would like to think that it may be gives you a little bit of perspective as well. And being in the industry over 30 years, I’ve seen things like this go back and forth so many times. There were some people said, hey, I’m going to read this. All of it looks staged and you will ask yourself why you’re even watching it. So if you haven’t done a primary research group, you need to shut the up. I’ve done probably 200 behind the glass research projects. And this is exactly what they look like. Now, if Apple lovers went in expecting that it was Apple, there might be a little bit, hey, I’m going to say that I love this stuff because I love Apple.
And I think this is Apple. I forget the name of the guy who was proctoring this, was it ship or Nick, but definitely looked like some of the people that I’ve met at Apple. So it was actually really good. So there is a little bit of that. And there is the disconnect between what people say they’re going to do in a primary research session versus what they actually do. But all this stuff is completely missing the point. And then another person said, it’s so insulting Apple fans, isn’t exactly a bright move. So let me address the two of these very quickly. Listen, we’re way over. We’re just riffing right now. It’s Saturday morning. But first of all, Intel is not targeting to educate the unmovable Apple fans, probably like my wife, which is like, she’s got her MacBook.
She knows how to use it. She’s comfortable with it. And she’s going to get, just keep buying it and buying it, buying it because she doesn’t have to relearn something. And she likes how it integrates with her iPhone. That’s it. She’s never going to move, but she’s not the target. What Intel is doing is they’re targeting people who are on the fence, okay? The on the fence voters. And the other thing they’re doing is they are communicating to their ecosystem, software and hardware partners. That we’re very proud of what we do. And we think we do a good job at it and look at this. So missing the point, they’re not targeting Apple people, completely missing the point. And you know what? If you haven’t sat in a research study at 10:00 PM, eating M&M’S questioning people, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
With that said, the fact is that Windows PCs and the ecosystem has a much higher level of innovation that Apple has brought to the table since they brought the original MacBook Air. There’s just nothing there. Why? Because the resources were not because Apple is not smart. They are. It’s because the resources were put on iPhone, watch and iPad. That was the priority. And number four, maybe number five was MacBooks.
Daniel Newman: And now services. Yeah. And they’ve crank this up. I’m wondering maybe autos in there somewhere. But quite frankly, it just never was a priority. And if you remember, I call this the Tim Cook apology tour, where Tim Cook went out and said, no, no, no, no. PC’s are actually important to us. Just wait, but I do give Apple credit for the M1. It is a high performance, low power on the leading edge of manufacturer. It doesn’t run many games at all that gamers want to play. It’s not fully compatible yet with some professional audio and video peripherals. And that’s one of the biggest reasons that they’re keeping Intel around. And also for the corporate users who have a nine month to a year process of testing. And when that security software doesn’t work with the M1 processor, it becomes an issue. Okay. So give Apple credit for innovation, where it’s due on the M1. But when it comes to the MacBook as a platform, not even close.
I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing, man. I know, but that you hit it home, some good silicon valley innovation path, but not necessarily in terms of that whole user experience, certainly not at the enterprise level. Like you said, we’re just kind of riffing at this point, but I give Intel credit. Like I said, they stood back for a long time and let everybody kind of throw spears at them. And to some extent, they’re standing strong, still a very significant market share, great partnerships and OEMs. If they want to take a little poke at Apple very now and again, I think they deserve that.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. It’s exciting stuff. Pat Gelsinger recently came out and said, quote, unquote, “AMD’s lead is over after all their lake and Sapphire rapids. And it’s like, wow. And I can tell you that Intel or Microsoft is not going to take even the M1 standing down. And let’s put that in perspective. Apple has 8% market share. Now most of that’s in the premium market a thousand bucks, so it’s very profitable. But kind of put in perspective, 8% market share as opposed to iPhone global market share at around 25%. And USI phone market church, 50%. So there’s a big difference there.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
