Re: intel blah blah blah
There's still competition for Intel even without AMD having any high-end CPUs (which hopefully will be changing very soon). Right now I am using a computer with an i5-2500k CPU. I haven't upgraded it because I don't see any compelling reason to do so. The newer generations of Intel CPUs do not offer performance increases compelling enough to make it worth the expense.
In essence, Kaby Lake and Skylake have competition from Sandy Bridge, Haswell, and all of the older generations of their own CPUs. People won't upgrade if there is no compelling reason to do so, and the small IPC gains post-Sandy aren't enough for a great many of us. I don't think for a moment that the current slowdown in CPU performance increases between generations is because Intel is being lazy and resting on their laurels because they know they're on top. There are millions upon millions of older-generation CPUs like mine out there, chugging along nicely as they have always done, and Intel would love to get our money. They're just not able to produce something so compelling that I simply have to have it!
Similarly, Windows has long had competition from older generations of Windows. When Vista appeared, massive numbers of people rejected it; most stuck with the previous product, Windows XP. Vista's bugs, the performance issues, the continued delays, the "Vista capable" debacle, and the long list of Longhorn features that were promised but that never made it to the final product served to make Windows Vista seem like a worse choice than keeping Windows XP. Vista was utterly destroyed in competition with Windows XP, and even though it evolved into a pretty good OS within a few years, it had no chance of overcoming its stigma. Today, Vista has less than a tenth of the market share that XP has, even though XP has been out of security support for years, while Vista is still supported (for another two months as I write this).
Microsoft had to "up" their game and deliver a real winner to turn this around, and they did so with Windows 7. That's the kind of thing you would expect in a competitive market, not one dominated by a monopolist. Microsoft has no serious competition in the PC OS market, but any given version of Windows does-- and that's the older versions of Windows.
The same thing is playing out now with Win 10. A large percentage of the market has rejected 10, and even after an unprecedented push to give 10 away free to all home/SOHO users who would take it (and to a certain number who said NO but got it anyway), Windows 7 has held on to the top spot. Previously, MS would have worked to make sure the next version of Windows would address what was lacking in the previous version, but they've decided go go another way with this.
Microsoft's refusal to fix any of the things wrong with 10 and to instead continue to push an inferior product, knowing that eventually other versions of Windows will become unviable because of security issues, is the behavior of a monopolist. They've told us that in Windows, we have no future but 10, the "last version of Windows ever", and now they just need to run out the clock and wait for the other versions of Windows to die of old age. So much for the "new" Microsoft... I've truly never despised them as much as I do now.
Intel, though, has no such luxury. Windows requires constant security updates to remain useful, and those updates have to come from Microsoft. They can't cut 7 and 8 off now, as the EULA obligates them to support both for ten years from the date of release, but that deadline is coming. CPUs, on the other hand, will continue to work as they were designed for years, even decades to come. Intel could refuse further microcode updates for older chips, but most users don't even know what that means-- it can't be used as a selling feature of newer chips if people don't even know what microcode is, and the majority never will.