I’m much happier with a company that is satisfied with its market, does what it does well, and leaves it at that

No problem here, yet

I’m not a believer of “more money for the money gods, ever increasing profits, let’s fuck over some more consumers and further line the shareholders pockets”.

points at Skylake explain that then. Let’s not pretend Intel was a Saint while AMD was busy running their business into the ground. Intel was price gouging the hell out of consumers back then. Intel had a whopping 9% performance gain over two CPU generations. We get more than that now in a single one (well if you’re not Intel that is but more on that later). Intel is not one of those saintly companies you outlined in your previous statement and it never was. When they had the chance to price gouge time and time again they showed that they will do exactly that. Let’s not get into their anti-competitive practices whenever AMD actually manages to get something good out.

And while at it Intel is not even good at making Desktop CPUs anymore. They are stuck on monolithic chips that cost a shitload to manufacture so while AMD is busy reducing their production costs and improving their flexibility Intel is still reeling from Zen 1 and seemingly can’t do anything other than making bigger and bigger chips at higher and higher voltages. I don’t have their internal financials but looking at what’s publicly available they are running out of excess margin to bleed off. Their (high-end) products don’t make them a lot of money anymore, if that, because the yield for them is just abhorrently bad. They got hit out of left field by Zen but instead of sitting down and acknowledging that they fucked up and “innovated” themselves into a corner they doubled down on monolithic chips and dug their grave deeper. And why? Simple: innovating costs money and Intel is all about profit so that was a big nono.

If they push someone else out, that’s more specialties lost.

History shows that rather happens due to monopolies preventing new players from entering a field (infamously the dozens of potential cancer cures that just landed in big pharma’s drawer of patents that don’t make enough money) but you do you I guess.

but I’m much happier that their GPUs have generally flopped

You shouldn’t be, we have 2 companies competing there and it isn’t going very well for the consumer. Fewer companies in an industry = less competition.

Oh and of course

reliable desktop CPU

yeah well that one is easy if you stop drastically changing your product while still increasing prices as if you were.