The ‘PC’ market has always included laptops and yes Pat is referring to both desktops and laptops in his statement.
The thing is, the market Intel has got cornered is already much smaller than it used to be. Email and even text processing and spreadsheets have made the jump to the cloud, so they're available everywhere. Pretty much all open source projects are available on Linux, so they already compile to ARM. This leaves Intel with games and a handful of other closed source apps that only run on x86.
Don't get me wrong, Intel is safe for now, the road to displace them is long. But it's (much) shorter than it used to be.
You guys seem to have missed the fine nuanced point of communication with intent. Let me short this.
Intel divides the PC sector, not combines it. Reporting combines it. If you spend more than a nanosecond you'd see that lumping IoT, laptops, desktop CPUs, and all of their SoC business together would be detrimental. For a moment, think like somebody in accounting. There have been almost no periods (almost) where all of these business divisions were all up...so reporting them as one amorphous blob to investors is just moronic when you want to be able to shuffle losses behind gains.
My bet is you see something like this:
PC Gamer CPU shipments, and forget this is a post-facto measurement of business which is not a rational starting point for how Intel projects their futures.
Here's the other problem with your assertion about things. Who is in the largest market right now? I'll wait. .... .... .... Yeah, that's business and contract work. Let me explain this to you in terms of business...every single company that buys a new ERP system that's cutting edge is hiding a dozen or two using tech that hasn't appreciably been updated in two decades. Let me provide an example. About 6 or 7 years ago there was a sudden shortage of plastics. Do you know why? Well, it was because there are about 2 global suppliers for most polycarbonate plastic in the world. Yes, 2. One of those two had the brilliant idea to update their ERP system...and screwed it up. As in they could not see any non-active orders, couldn't project usages, and couldn't even pull formulations. Yes, we experienced a huge price increase because somebody update and broke their ERP system. That part didn't get a lot of play...but this was pre-pandemic so people were immediately furious that they couldn't buy everything as cheaply as they used to...
Another anecdote? How many of us were born at or before the 1980's? Well, that's just about the last time we saw an update to AS400...and many companies are still rocking it as their ERP and to some extent MRP system...in 2023. Yes, a basic database with an obtuse at best monochrome interface is what we have in 2023...and it controls companies who make John Deere, Caterpillar, and the automotive sector run.
Why provide these anecdotes? I mean, even now we're seeing companies migrate their AS400 instances to the cloud...so it's obvious that this is just a perspective thing...right? No. AS400 doesn't like reporting, cannot project usages, and is basically just a bad front end for access to a database set....but it's something that has to be supported. Likewise, the defense industry contracts crap that has to last for 20+ years...so there's hardware out there still rocking XP and older OS's...who will basically not support newer hardware anymore.
If it wasn't obvious yet, my point is that once you carve out the niche new stuff (IoT and SoCs), remove the stuff that moves in much lower volumes due to there being far less margin in design given the engineering and testing requirements (laptops), and look at what is left you basically don't have the option to force everybody into the ARM future because nobody in their right mind would spend millions recoding a 1980s era database program into a new instruction set...and most companies see a few millions of dollars in transferring to a new ERP system as prohibitively expensive.
Your point stands that this is not everybody...but that's also an exclusionary argument. Not everybody collects toenail clippings...so would it make sense to tell people you want to invest that your latest project is weak because the 1:1000 clipping collectors wouldn't like it....or would it make sense to sell investors on the 999 people who are good with it? Yeah, that was a bit creepy of an argument...but it does keep in perspective that we are freaks. We are people who see value in recoding programs to run efficiently. Thing is, most of us don't have millions or billions of dollars to make this happen...so it behooves Intel to reinforce the assertion that PC business is not threatened...and ignore the laptop, SoC, and IoT business which is emergent, and not linked to multiple decades of entrenched software.
The reason I laugh...and I'm even chuckling at the people who want to call me out, is that the real world is something they often ignore. It is what I used to do...because it makes no sense for a million dollar machine to be held to ransom if a 3 cent component breaks on an outdated system...right? Well...in my lifetime I've seen a PLC with no ROM used to be cheap, maintained by a sealed lead acid battery to have the program in active memory constantly even without running the thing for months, because if they ever lost power the memory would rapidly degrade. All of this was bolted into a 1930's era rubber rolling machine, which had been gutted and rebuilt with as cheap of a PLC as could be found, to roll out metals. Yes, a company held its future hostage to stuff that was literally twice as old as most members of their work force, because they didn't want to budget in 30k for an updated system. They of course spent 30k+ over multiple years to have the PLC reflashed, the couple of dollars of battery replaced semi-annually because our engineers sucked at planning at let it fall to quality, and most importantly the thousands of dollar we'd have saved if they ever approved for a cheap new PLC...but we could always blame productivity for these bad decisions on our inability to get the job done and not the absolutely borked tools.
Yes Intel is not afraid of losing market share. Yes, they specify in the PC market only. No, this is not a coincidence. Yes, most PC customers are without immediate need for a new architecture...as the cost to benefits is not yet proven. If you disagree with me I'll be glad to entertain your argument...but the problem is that this is PR, so there's as much to unpack about how things are said as what things are said. "We see not challenge in market X" doesn't mean no challenges, and market X is not necessarily what you think it is. This is the joy of a statement, rather than an actual internal communication.
I laugh to think that people are riding Balmer...but right now just want to enjoy the criticism he received about Windows phone...whereas the current market is basically just the iPhone and everything else is android. That wasn't a failure...it was MS admitting their inability to compete and backing out before it cost them too much (experimenting...with less than ideal results). The PR speak surrounding it was a circus, but the endgame is MS came to a point where the perceived continued development cost of windows phone didn't have a return...so it died. As armchair generals we can say that this was a failure...but it was MS who had the chutzpah to admit defeat before the losses piled too high. Alternatively, how is that media center PC OS license coming as a stripped down standard OS...(crickets chirp)...oh yeah, they killed that because a few less dollars for a lot less functional of an OS was doomed...and they realized it eventually. MS is not great at predicting the future...but their CEOs have been pretty reasonable at knowing when to cut things they are not succeeding with. They are not perfect, they don't always deliver something good, but like Intel they know how to speak investor...which is not lying so much as bending truth but not breaking it...by clever selection of words.
