On Intel I think the "everything is going mobile" is PR for investors, the PC market doesn't have any foreseeable growth potential atm.

As a general FYI to those reading -- please fact check before commenting.

The Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program ended on Oct 29th, 2014 (538 days ago!) It is difficult to assert that a program which ended over 500 days ago is permanent.

Additionally, one may be willing to assert that "ZIRP is permanent regime now" too, to tack onto the culture that central banking has entered a new era.

For anyone who did not see that news, ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) ended on Dec 15, 2015 with a rise, and is currently believed to rise again at the next meeting.

Please explain the problem here. You're acting like there's some big deception imposed on the public due to companies choosing to return capital to shareholders via one specific mechanism. As if somehow they're buying back stock and "fooling" people into thinking they're making more money or something, and stock prices are irrationally rising. The buybacks, earnings, financials are all open for everyone to read. It's evident by some of your commentary that you can't be bothered.

If you don't agree with the price that other people are willing to sell for shares in this market, you are more than welcome to take the other side of that trade and sell into every buyer on the planet. I'm sure you're not doing that.

Nor is it remotely the only way to assume a bearish position.

>Stock buybacks can be deceptive if a company buys back stocks with debt and doesn't have proper cashflow to pay it off.

You can't tell the cash flow and debt levels from the financial reporting? You don't account for this in your valuation? Where is the deception? Report it to the SEC.

>Non-technical investors see the stock going up and keep piling more cash in.

An equivalent number of people are "pulling cash out". A stock trade is just that: a trade. Again, what makes you a better judge of the "correct" price than those actually making the deal?

>If you think markets are perfect, you have a lot to learn my friend

Not sure where that comes from, but you're right, I do have more to learn. That said, it looks like I'm a few levels up on you (and far less confident in my ability to predict anything).

http://b-i.forbesimg.com/jessecolombo/files/2014/01/united-s...

http://moneymorning.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/09...

http://www.naic.org/images/capital_markets_archive/2013/1305...

whether they do a token 0.5% hike (they probably won't), it's obvious that something very basic has changed, and quite likely irreversibly.

They also don't support your hypothesis that something has changed irreversibly.

Raising the interest rate more than 0.5% would have likely had a negative impact. It's very likely the Fed will raise it again later this year.

edit

Here's a link to read about it. https://mises.org/library/unseen-consequences-zero-interest-...

In the modern era of frac wells where depletion rates are like 50% in 2 years, broad economic demand is now much slower than production declines.

That's the problem with secondary recovery... The "balance sheet" looks good in that you'll profit (unless prices tank) but the cashflow is terrifying you don't dig a well and collect for 30 years like the old days, you do exotic processes and get high production rates for like two years, then production drops to zilch.

On a large, century size scale it screws up Hubbert graphs. You can ramp up for a century, but extensive secondary production means the decline slope will be just a couple years instead of a nice symmetric century or whatever.

By analogy its like switching farm land from an olive orchard to corn production and being surprised at fundamental shifts in the financial sheets. (Yo its just another plant, right, well theres a bit more to it...)

It is absolutely picking a narrative.

They sold off their ARM processors to Marvell. They've made various forays into wireless, though WiMAX didn't work out so well for them.

Really? About the only reason why I'm getting a new phone every so often is when the old one stops being updated. (My Nexus 4 lasted 3 years, and it would have done another year.)

Planned obsolescence, if you want.

Also, I play some games on my phone, and having better hardware helps a lot with that.

I could see how infrared sensor like in that new Caterpillar phone could come in useful especially if you are in a building trade, but fingerprint scanner?

You have to get a phone with one and use it for a week or so until its use becomes routine to really understand how big of a game changer it is. I subconsciously unlock my phone now every time I pick it up. It's amazing. Every day it saves me probably 60 seconds in total typing in stupid PINs, and those savings add up real quickly.

Incidentally I had a HTC Desire HD before and that became unusable on newer versions, as is the Nexus 7 now. These two clearly didn't have the good enough hardware specs.

http://www.epi.org/publication/the-class-of-2015/ For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is currently 7.2 percent (compared with 5.5 percent in 2007), and the underemployment rate is 14.9 percent (compared with 9.6 percent in 2007).

Things have really levelled out for average loads even developer loads (mostly do web dev, run vagrant machines that kind of thing).

I can't see me upgrading til this thing dies tbh.

But I got tired of 190F slowly being pumped out of my case and into the room. Its replacement is finally on the way. I preordered Intel's Skull Canyon NUC[0]. Got 32GB of DDR4-2800Mhz memory and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro PCIE/NVME M.2 SSD. I'll be dailychaining a single DisplayPort cable to 3 new LCDs as well.

Pretty huge leap in performance. It just made sense to stop building new computers and jump on the NUC bandwagon. All I do is development, League of Legends and the rare CSGo. The ~Geforce 750 performance levels that NUC will provide will be enough. The inclusion of the Thunderbolt3 port for an external GPU case really put my mind at ease. Not that I intend to utilize it, but I'm glad it's there. Same upgradability as any other machine. SSD/RAM/GPU. The CPU is soldered, but I never once replaced a CPU after building a computer anyway. Other than the few Athlons I killed from overclocking in ~2001.

Probably upgrade more often if these new gaming NUCs are as good as I think they'll be. Next upgrade for me will be 10nm + Thunderbolt4 NUC. And the final perk, all-Intel so it'll work great with any Linux distro natively. That's worth a lot to me.

Unless Intel failed hard with this thing, which I highly doubt.. it's Intel.. I'm all-in on NUCs from here on out.

[0]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102...

Good pick: it's still one of the faster chips around. However, it's TDP is 95W, which is fine for a desktop. Since then, Intel has been concentrating on delivering the same (or, often, much less) speed with lower TDP ratings.

These address the market need for thin, high-priced laptops -- preferably without fans -- that you can use in Starbucks.

You could "upgrade" to a new Intel Core i7-6600U that's actually slower than your i5-2500K but has a TDP of only 15W.

I'm really looking forwards to VR if it catches on though, having an insanely high resolution headset so I can dump multiple monitors for programming is a big win, combine that with something that has the portability/form factor of a MS Book/Macbook Pro and you'd be able to program as capably from a hotel room as at your desk at home/work.

That would be the biggest shift in my work habits since I went from Windows to Linux in the late 90's.

Also I think once everyone can get down to the same size as intel we might start seeing more exotic architectures, Intel has often won with the "with enough thrust a brick will fly" approach to engineering, it doesn't matter if your chip is clock for clock more efficient if Intel is operating at a level where they can put 5 times as many transistors down in the same unit area and ramp the clock speed way up.

Mostly it's about shuttling around 4 times as much memory for each screen as well as 4 times as much processing.

1920x1080 has ~ 2 million pixels. 3840x2160 has ~ 8 million pixels.

Internally iirc this is often done as vectors before been rasterised out and having various filters and shaders applied but that step requires that you store multiple buffers etc, same reason a card that will play a game just comfortably at 1024x768 will run away crying at 1920x1080 I guess.

My i7 desktop will be four years old in June. I've done the research and all I need to run the Oculus or HTC Vive (or the upcoming games that look good) is a graphics card upgrade.

I would like to compare CPU's with roads: Roads increase traffic, not the other way around. So if you make a faster CPU, the demand for a faster CPU increases.

So if Intel stops making faster CPU's, the demand will (unexpectedly) go down.

The automotive industry faced the same issue a long time ago, and their solution was to turn cars into a fashion statement. You no longer upgrade your car because your old one is worn out, you upgrade to signal your wealth through conspicuous consumption. The mobile phone market is somewhat the same way. The desktop PC market? Not so much.

There is some legitimate utility derived from novelty -- I don't want to be walking around in my grandfather's battered rags either -- but I wonder if some day we can shift towards something more sustainable and less paying to dig consumerist holes then paying again to fill them back in.

The point about your grandad's battered rags is that they're battered rags, though, not that they're old. His good leather jacket is probably still perfectly serviceable today.

I'd assume these acquisitions added to revenues.....

It's a sign of market maturity. Intel shouldn't be trading at a premium if it's selling a highly predictable, stable product to a consolidating marketplace.

But most of them are full of ARM chips fab'd by companies not named Intel.

hmm... only if I kid myself that the mobile phones (even the smart ones) are actually computing devices on which "I can compute whatever I wish to compute AND the way I can compute on a PC". Most of the ARM devices sold are NOT computing devices for the general person who purchases them.

It reminds me the fallacy of calling smart-phones "supercomputers in one's pocket".

May be the ARM chip based devices are "computing devices" for companies like Samsung, Google, or some car makers but certainly not for general public.

I crunched to inbox zero with my phone while commuting to work, while I'm typing this at my "real work computer"

Even if we disregard how arbitrary that definition of "computing device" is, it's still a false proposition. Anyone can easily get a browser, a word processor and spreadheets on their mobile device or tablet (ARM). That's about as much computing as a significant chunk of the population requires.

I have debian chroot on my Android device which gives me Vim, GCC and javac out of the box.

How much complexity do you think the average mind generates with its time? Enough to justify the ATP?

How much thinking do you think the average human does with his brains? Are brains worth it? Stay tuned.

I'm a power user. I have a 4 year old MacBook and a 2 core * 4GB VDI session. I won't replace the MacBook for another 18 months.

Even in enterprise IT... Every project we did in 2004/2005 required a server purchase with two Xeon sockets and a NIC that might be Intel.

Now the average marginal unit of virtual server needs 1/50 of an Intel Xeon. And a lot of those Xeons are at AWS, which squeezes the margins.

Both Intel's sales and profit are even YoY in 2015, and up from 2013. This doesn't have much to do with computer sales.