> From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance.

Intel was pretty aggressively driving down price-per-core up until the 6000 series/ 14nm chips. For example here's the price series for a 6-core chip from each of their series:

i7 970 (Nehalem-E, July 2010): $885

i7 3930K (Sandy Bridge-E, Nov 2011): $583

i7 5820K (Haswell-E, Aug 2014): $389

i7 6800K (Broadwell-E, May 2016): $434

So in basically 4 years (+1 month) they reduced the price of their entry-level 6-core processors by more than half (56% reduction), comparing 970 vs 5820K. It specifically is Broadwell (the first 14nm chip) where intel lost the plot and prices started increasing.

People also dump on Intel for not increasing core count in the consumer platform chips, which I think is a deeper subject than people treat it as. Certainly by the 6000 series they should have pushed the consumer platform up to 6 cores, but fundamentally the consumer socket is driven by the economics of office machines and walmart PCs. Up through Haswell, 4 cores was the right amount for an average desktop for the average office worker (not talking about powerful workstations for developers here, those users always had the option of the HEDT platform with more cores/memory) or the average home user (again, not talking about power gamers, and if you wanted more HEDT was always a fairly reasonably-priced option too, especially during the Haswell generation). There was, at the time, no 6-core die, the next step upwards was the 8-core HEDT die with quad-channel RAM and all that other stuff, and I doubt that would have fit into a consumer socket even if you wanted it to, and having 6-core chips with dual-channel RAM probably would have impacted performance until DDR4 came along with the 6000 series.

On the whole Intel didn't actually do too bad up until the 6000 series, when the combination of a complete shitshow of a 14nm node (in these latter years of 14++++ people forget what a mess early 14nm was), the lack of competition, and the beancounters gaining firm control of the company all combined. But that's really a specific, narrow range of time - 2016 and 2017 mostly. Then in 2017 Intel shit their pants after seeing Ryzen and released the 8700K, which was a wildly aggressive product for Intel at the time - same i7 pricing but 50% more cores, and such a solid product that it basically forced AMD into similar price reductions (abandoning the $500+ segment for a generation, and big price cuts on their existing products).

I really see the "intel got greedy" thing as being specifically 2016-2017. 5820K was extremely good value for a 6-core (even if it did need a "more expensive motherboard", those are cheaper than a high-end X570 now and far far cheaper than sTRX40), the problem was the 6000 series and failing to push core count up on the consumer socket at that time, and I think that is largely attributable to early 14nm woes. Certainly by the 7000 series yields would have improved and Intel could have pushed core counts up, 7000 series is arguably one of the worst releases Intel has done in terms of how rapidly it aged out of the market.

(although to be fair - up until like 2018/2019 you could easily sell a 7700K and get almost all your money back and do a straight upgrade to a 8700K, so it wasn't the end of the world from a user perspective.)