MacBooks And iPads Delayed As Apple Hit By Global Chip Supply Shortage

The novel coronavirus has caused severe component shortage globally which has affected the manufacturing of several tech items, including game consoles and GPUs.

Apple

And now, reports reveal that this shortage has now affected Apple¡¯s MacBooks and iPads.

This is according to a report by Nikkei that has revealed that chip shortages have caused delays in a crucial step in MacBook production that involves mounting components on printed circuit boards before assembly.

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iPads on the other hand, are affected due to a shortage of display and components involved in the installation of displays, as per sources. This has forced the Cupertino giant to delay a chunk of component orders from the first half of this year to the second half of the year.

This is obviously surprising coming from Apple since the brand has a stellar reputation in managing one of the world's most complicated supply chains. Its practices have helped Apple stay out of the trouble of component shortage for a while, while companies around the world are continuing to struggle.

As per Nikkei Asia, Apple sits on number four spot (with a 7.7 percent market share) in the league of top laptop makers, with the list lead by Lenovo, HP and Dell. In the tablet market, Apple is undefeated with a 32.5 percent market share.

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Will this affect iPhone production too?

Not as of now, according to the report. The company is on schedule for its iPhone manufacturing however, sources have hinted that the supply of some components for the iPhone is ¡®quite tight¡¯. The report states that the component shortage remains to be just an issue with the supply chain and it has not yet reached the product-availability stage.

Reuters

Wallace Gou, president and CEO of Silicon Motion, a NAND flash memory controller chip developer that supplies Samsung, Western Digital, Micron, said in a statement to Nikkei Asia, "We really don't see an end to this shortage, and things could be even worse, looking ahead to the end 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."