Despite missing expectations, Apple reported a respectable $83.36 billion in revenue, thanks to the increasing demand for the iPhone 13 range and M1 Mac family. Unfortunately, the aforementioned figure could have been higher if not for supply constraints, which apparently cost the California-based giant $6 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter.
Apple Is Working to Fix These Supply Constraints, but It May Take a While, as There Are Still Long Wait Times for the iPhone 13
Speaking to CNBC’s Josh Lipton, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the following on the supply constraints.
“We had a very strong performance despite larger than expected supply constraints, which we estimate to be around $6 billion. The supply constraints were driven by the industry wide chip shortages that have been talked about a lot, and COVID-related manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia.”
Earlier, we reported that Apple is working to improve supply issues for the iPhone 13, but Cook has not provided an expected timeline on when the situation is expected to improve. These supply constraint issues can also have an adverse impact on future products released by Apple, as those will likely feature advanced chips mass produced on TSMC’s technology. Sadly, if TSMC is unable to keep up with demand, customers will probably see longer wait times for future iPhones and Macs.
To keep pace with this demand, TSMC recently announced its N4P architecture, which will serve as a performance and power-efficiency improvement over the 5nm node. However, while it touts significant advantages, including improvement of wafer cycles production that should ease the grip on this chip shortage, it is still using the 5nm architecture, and not the 4nm one, meaning that real-world performance might not see a massive gain.
TSMC is expected to release the first tape-outs on N4P by the second half of 2022. Earlier, the manufacturer was said to mass produce 3nm chips for Apple in H2, 2022, but after a while, we reported that this node might have to be delayed. If these delays persist, customers might see longer wait times for future Apple products, but let us hope it does not come to that.
News Source: CNBC
