<p>This is Haswell and there has already been a lot released on Haswell though I’m sure that Intel will release some more juicy (for geeks that is) details. What I’d love to see is a Bay Trail cpu in a glass box running Windows or Android. Intel often demos parts that aren’t scheduled to ship for 1-2 years. They’re lab samples and not ready for production but it proves that Intel has the goods and that they’re in the process of getting them ready for production.</p>
<p>Geeks like technical details like chip architecture. The media sites like to see actual devices. I like both.</p>
<p>I read the latest earnings report and the transcript of pba’s shareholder meeting. Looks pretty good to me. More importantly, investors like what they see.</p>
<p>Thanks. I am out of the trade because I wanted some fast money. I sold the 50 strike naked calls for 6.70 and bought them back at 3.60. I could have held them but I am not interested in risk on that stock. I am still mad I couldn’t find shares to short. I would have loaded up if I could have found shares to short.</p>
<p>You did a good job. I didn’t call anybody but the optioms market was saying the cost to borrow was over 50 percent a year. More than tsla. Anyway… Very nice</p>
<p>1) I believe there is plenty of life left in the PC, regardless of what the press says. As the economy recovers, companies will start refreshing hardware and buying servers; MS improvements to Windows 8 will lead to increased consumer PC sales, and Mac computer sales are still growing. They have little competition in this space.</p>
<p>2) Intel’s got a design win with a Samsung tablet, a Lenovo phone in China has been released. They are starting to make some noise in the mobile space, with what’s in the pipeline for low power use/high processing power, they will capture serious market share. I predict with 2 years that Apple, just like they did with Macs, will switch to Intel chips. Same with Samsung devices.</p>
<p>3) Dividend yield of almost 4% limits the downside I think, unless their earnings really go south. With the multiples it is trading at, it seems somewhat undervalued.</p>
<p>Servers are still selling well. All of those mobile devices need servers to do a lot of the work. Companies are actually still buying PCs - they’ve just made the refresh cycle longer. I think that the definition of PCs is going to expand to Android PCs (as in PC sticks) and Chromebooks. Things are looking good for Intel but you have to take a long-term horizon (more than two weeks) and they have to execute but they have a good record of that.</p>
<p>“Due largely to the “touch friendly” nature of Windows 8 and generally competitive pricing from ODMs, DisplayBank has reported that shipments of touchscreen-equipped notebooks increased by 51.8 percent in Q1 2013 (compared to Q4 2012) to 4.57 million units.”</p>
<p>I don’t know if this is because there are so many touchscreen laptops out there now and people buy them for the other features or if touch is a selling point. I saw an engineer using a MacBook Air and he was doing all sorts of things with it - he’s running Mountain Lion but he can do a lot of touch-things that I can’t do (I’m on Snow Leopard). It appears that Apple’s version of touch is via the touchpad and it’s quite effective.</p>
<p>The big problem is laptops selling for $200 - $300 where there isn’t a lot of profit for the CPU vendor. The trick for Intel and the hardware companies is to make features compelling enough so that consumers will pay for the better CPUs. That has proven challenging the last few years as consumers are buying cheap PCs and expensive mobile devices.</p>
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