Intel's 57-year story is wild - from 12 people in a garage to a $100B geopolitical chess piece

spent my weekend going through a massive deep dive on Intel's full history and honestly some of this stuff blew my mind like did you know Apple literally asked Intel to make chips for the first iPhone and Intel said no? Otellini later admitted "my gut told me to say yes." TSMC took that business instead and now Apple pays them \~$24B a year. that single decision basically changed the entire semiconductor industry or the fact that Intel dumped $152B into stock buybacks since 1990 instead of keeping their manufacturing edge. they also had a 15% stake in ASML worth billions and sold most of it before the stock went 17x. just pain the 10nm disaster is even worse when you see the timeline. they were stuck on 14nm for SEVEN generations of products (2014-2021) while TSMC went 7nm > 5nm > 3nm without breaking a sweat but heres where it gets interesting now. Panther Lake launched in January on Intel 18A and reviews are actually decent. they got the worlds first High-NA EUV machines from ASML (TSMC is skipping this tech entirely until \~2031). US government bought a 9.9% stake making them the largest shareholder. Nvidia committed $5B for custom chips the bear case is real tho - foundry losses hit $16.6B in Q3 2024, TSMC N2 has 30% better density, and they still need to prove external customers will actually commit curious what you guys think. is Lip-Bu Tan the right guy to turn this around or is it too late?