Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

This is the kind of thing that will put downward pressure on Intel's ASPs. I imagine quite a few people may buy these instead of "real" laptops, and neither MS nor intel will make a dime off of them.

What is the difference to netbooks a few years ago? Intel made quite some nice earnings with those. It's still way below what a full featured laptop can do in terms of actual performance - and that's not just the CPU (but an important part of it). So, what's different this time?

I just see more and more competition in the ARM camp, taking money from those who are actually capable of developing cores like this new Apple A8X (which is impressive). Qualcomm soon may have trouble justifying the huge investment into custom ARM cores while Mediatek, Intel and others are eating into their low end and comms revenue. Samsung didn't even start building custom cores and their decreasing mobile revenue together with direct competition with potential customers will make selling to them hard. I also doubt Nvidia will ever get the return on its investments in that field - the Nexus 9 won't do it.

For Apple this certainly is fine. They can continue to build best in class custom cores (and adjust their proprietary task scheduler for things like triple cores) and their Android competition will fall behind. Intel on the other hand can win marketshare by flooding the market and starve the me-too Android-ARM competition.

I must admit, though, that A8X and Denver really are impressive and damn close to what low end Intel Core X can do. Intel really must raise the bar in terms of core CPU performance with Skylake. 10% speed increases simply aren't sufficient anymore. Additionally, Core M must be integrated with on-die peripherals with Android compatibility to fight the high end there, while Atom takes on the mid- and low-end of the market.