What's that about Apple hardware? Pfft, says Intel as it intros magical self-healing PC

No cure for self-inflicted manufacturing wounds though, sadly

Intel's battle to remain relevant continued overnight as it noted the shift to remote working and trumpeted the ways it might assist IT departments dealing with a suddenly remote workforce.

Citing research findings that 74 per cent of companies will be shunting some employees to permanent remote work, Chipzilla made the unsurprising claim that the "most important ally in navigating this new normal" was the good old PC.

Those will be Intel-based machines, we presume, despite the popularity of AMD's chippery and Apple's move away from Intel silicon in its upcoming range of Macs.

Intel's approach to fighting off these threats appears to be two-pronged: innovation and unleashing IT buzzwords that include "AI" and "Machine Learning."

These innovations include "all-day battery life, always-on capabilities, enhanced connectivity, and our vision of the self-healing PC." While it would be a stretch to regard much of the former as an "innovation" nowadays, the concept of the self-healing PC does merit a closer look.

While "self-healing" might make one think of Spectre-shaped holes blown through Intel silicon being repaired in the background, it is actually all about the slurping of telemetry to spot issues before a user decides to raise a ticket. Examples given include performance problems and failing hardware.

Microsoft will also cheerfully fling self-healing systems at users; it claimed Microsoft 365 Defender, for example, "stops attacks across Microsoft 365 services and auto-heals affected assets."

For its part, Intel would very much like enterprises to sign up to its vPro platform to manage an increasingly remote fleet of PCs. It recently buddied up with Ivanti with a view to shoring up its on-premises and cloud-based endpoint services.

But as for the self-healing PC, with an awful lot of existing solutions out there that will happily keep all manner of hardware and software ticking over, one can but hope that Intel will first deal with its own woes, both financial - profit was down 30 per cent last quarter due to enterprise and govt data-center sales dips - and physical, before spreading its tentacles into a suddenly remote workforce. ®