In context: Big companies like Apple, Samsung, and HP typically take enough clout to get suppliers to prioritize them over smaller companies. Fifty-fifty though chips are hard to come up by, these giants still thrived. Now, as Apple struggles to procure parts, the severity of the shortage seems to be coming to a head fifty-fifty for them.

Despite Apple's earnings existence through the roof and rumors that its 2nd-generation silicon may be ready in time for fall-released devices, Macbooks and iPads due out in the second half of 2022 will probable exist delayed. The global bit shortage is affecting all manufacturers, including Apple, which is at present producing its own SoCs full-bore.

The trouble is not that Apple tree cannot manufacture enough of its 5mn M1 chips. It struggles with its supply chain to obtain other components, like disk controllers and display drivers, which rely on silicon manufactured with older processes.

Nikkei Asia notes that Apple has "postponed" production of MacBooks and iPads as it grapples with suppliers to obtain components used at "cardinal" points in its assembly lines.

"Bit shortages have caused delays in a key pace in MacBook production -- the mounting of components on printed excursion boards earlier terminal associates," sources say. "Some iPad associates, meanwhile, was postponed considering of a shortage of displays and brandish components."

And so while the M2 flake will be prepare as early equally July for the next MacBooks later this year, Apple has delayed Q2 component orders until the 2nd half of 2022. The tech behemothic'due south action says a lot about how severe the chip shortage has become, considering Apple is very skillful at managing its supply concatenation.

The sources say that the move is non affecting iPhone production but did note that the supply of some iPhone parts is nonetheless "quite tight." Nosotros might not meet iPhone delays this year, merely if scrap manufacturers cannot catch upwards, nosotros could see Apple skip a year or delay its 2022 flagships until early 2023.

Silicon Motion CEO Wallace Gou has a bleak outlook on the situation. Silicon Motion supplies NAND flash retention controller chips to companies, including Samsung, Western Digital, Micron, and Kingston, to name a few.

"We really don't encounter an stop to this shortage, and things could be even worse, looking ahead to the stop of the June quarter, as some smaller tech players could run out of some critical inventories to build their products and need to scale back production," Gou predicted.

Epitome credit: Apple tree Building by Vytautas Kielaitis, Inside MacBook by Akram Habibi