Memes

Most of the time, the product itself comes out of engineering just fine and then it gets torn up and/or ruined by the business side of the company. That said, sometimes people do make mistakes - in my mind, it’s more of how they’re handled by the company (oftentimes poorly). One of the products my team worked on a few years ago was one that required us to spin up our own ASIC. We spun one up (in the neighborhood of ~20-30 million dollars USD), and a few months later, found a critical flaw in it. So we spun up a second ASIC, again spending $20-30M, and when we were nearly going to release the product, we discovered a bad flaw in the new ASIC. The products worked for the most part, but of course not always, as the bug would sometimes get hit. My company did the right thing and never released the product, though.

Capitalism: "Make as much as possible as fast as possible"

It's not easy to make shit that doesn't work if you care about what you're doing. I bet there's angry debates between engineers and business majors behind many of these enshitifications.

Though, for these Intel ones, they might have been less angry and more "are you sure these risks are worth taking?" because they probably felt like they had to push them to the extreme to compete. The angry conversations probably happened 5-10 years ago before AMD brought the pressure when Intel was happy to assume they had no competition and didn't have to improve things that much to keep making a killing. At this point, it's just a scramble to make up for those decisions and catch up. Which their recent massive layoffs won't help with.

I've put together 2 computers the last couple years, one Intel (12th gen, fortunately) and one AMD. Both had stability issues, and I had to mess with the BIOS settings to get them stable. I actually had to under-clock the RAM on the AMD (probably had something to do with maxing-out the RAM capacity, but I still shouldn't need to under-clock, IMO). I think I'm going to get workstation-grade components the next time I need to build a computer.

So this doesn't apply to the Intel situation, but a good lesson to learn is that the bleeding edge cuts both ways. Meaning that anyone buying the absolute latest technology, there's going to be some friction with usability at first. It should never surmount to broken hardware like the Intel CPUs, but buggy drivers for a few weeks/months is kinda normal. There's no way of knowing what's going to happen when a brand new product is going to be released. The producer must do their due diligence and test for anything catastrophic but weird things happen in the wild that no one can predict. Like I said at the top, this doesn't apply to Intel's situation because it was a catastrophic failure, but if you're ever on the bleeding edge assume eventually you're going to get cut.

Welcome to capitalism. Infinite growth is required, and when a market is well and truly saturated the next step is cutting more and more costs.

Incidentally, Cancer also pursues a similar strategy.

Planned Obsolescence is a real problem. But Intel in this situation is just straight up incompetence.