Lee Hutchinson of Ars Technica once wrote that a junior engineer now at Boeing has no viable path for promotion towards the C-suite. The middle rank engineering teams have all been divested and the only way to rise up the ranks is to actually leave Boeing, work at a different company, rise up the ranks there and come back a decade later.

The only difference is that you're less likely to be sent to Gulag, or worse.

AMD and TSMC both have always had technical leaders. Intel had a series of legendary technical CEOs during their most formidable years.

The first non-technical-PhD CEO they had was Otellini, but he had been there for 30 years before becoming CEO.

Think of it like a career change at age 42.

Imagine being married with a couple of children and at 42 you tell your wife that you are going to spend all of your free time, and a lot of your money working on becoming a lawyer. You want to do this because you think your current career is topped out and you want to be prepared for the future. In 6-8 years you'll be ready for the career change, but you'll need to start at the bottom of the laywer pool and work your way back up, your expenses won't change, nor will your obligations, just your income, and it will go down substantially.

I worked in a startup and we had a product that cost $1k per seat and it was full featured and slick as hell, but we started getting competition from a company that was selling a bare bones product for $99 a seat. Our customers really liked their price, but they wanted our features, in the end price won and we started losing business to the competitor.

Because of my company we actually legitimatized a market for an certain type of after market computer cards, we spent a ton of time and money helping to build the surrounding ecosystem so that our product could have a market. Once we invested all the money, the competitor came along and could ride the ecosystem we built, but we still needed to cover all of our costs, hence our high price.

I spent a ton of time arguing with the BOD about pricing and volumes, but they had financial models they had to meet and an $89 product had no place, luckily for us we got acquired because of our expertise and the work that we did to create the market. If we hadn't been acquired we would have been overrun by our competitor, and it had noting to do with lazy.

As Buffett says, "price is what you pay, value is what you get." Your ex-co failed to provide reasons why customers should pay for the value it offers.

Apple excels at this, despite naysayers saying that a premium consumer electronics is a "bad business".

They want to stay the Ferrari, Bang & Olufsen of mobile phones and laptops.

Yep, Apple et al. are reaping what they sow here. All their employees go find suppliers in Asia for their hardware. The travel schedules are so grueling that you basically have to be from the country/province where the supplier is located for it to be a tolerable job (free trips home!). So basically, we have Asian engineers seeking out Asian suppliers on behalf of an American company where only the top few levels are American. The chance those Asian engineers are going to cut out the American company in 10 years is high.

But I was lazy in conflating the two cases so thanks for pointing that out.

By pushing the PC, the nucleus of all development, to ARM they are helping push the whole software industry onto a heavily globalized platform with many vendor choices and generally available IP.

The second justification though is that the CPU architecture is less significant on the system scale. The SOC really is a ”system” (we used to predict this in the 1990s but couldn’t get there then) with a lot of other some what specialized functional units designed to work together.

In that the A series are more reminiscent of the mainframes of old, where the CPU really was merely the central processing unit and a tremendous amount of processing went on in other processing units.

To me this is Apple trying to stay ahead of ARM Chromebooks and the desktop-ification of Android/Chrome. If left alone another half decade, it’s possible that Chromium via either Google or Microsoft could have made more of a dent in the wider market than just education uses. Adobe is already facilitating creatives to cheaper Windows workstations.

Frankly, Apple investing in unique silicon for their software simply means it will be more unique, just as the iPad has defended its place through an unbeatable software ecosystem and “cheap enough” hardware. If the Mac can go “cheap enough” to iPad pricing, this is Apple carving out its niche and market for the decade to come...

Right. ChromeOS is getting interesting. At first glance it seems to be even more limited and appliance-like than iOS, but now you can run both Android and Linux software in containers, which opens up many more potential uses.

I advise you to see how huge are the overseas captive outsourcing centres of all of said companies are.