Overseas report says Apple has reduced iPhone 14 orders by 10% despite rumors of strong demand
Digitimes, not known for its accuracy, said yesterday, “It is understood that the mass production of Apple’s iPhone 14 series has started, but the target shipment of the first wave of 90 million units has been reduced by 10%.” TSMC, the largest independent chip foundry in the world, counts Apple as its top customer. The firm takes the chip designs submitted by companies like Apple and builds the final product. Three of TSMC’s top customers, Apple, AMD, and NVIDIA, have reduced orders for certain chips.
Render of the 6.7-inch Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
To reiterate, there is speculation that only the iPhone 14 Pro variants (iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max) will have the new A16 Bionic under the hood. This has angered several iPhone users who are wondering why they will be asked to pay the usual amount for a new iPhone powered by an older SoC. This is an argument that we probably will hear more about following the unveiling of the iPhone 14 series in September since there has been no official word from Apple about its semiconductor plans for the 2022 iPhone models.
Has Ming-Chi Kuo lost his credibility as a source of accurate Apple leaks?
As long as we brought analyst Ming-Chi Kuo into this story, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that the TF International analyst has run into some controversy about a recent tweet he posted that said Apple “failed” and was unable to develop an in-home 5G modem chip for the iPhone.
The tweet suggested that the company made an error in designing the chip and said that Apple would continue work on it. Apple was hoping to lessen its reliance on Qualcomm and had been developing its own in-house modem that was expected to debut on the 2023 iPhone 15 series. In his tweet, Kuo wrote that as a result of this failure, Qualcomm would be the exclusive supplier of the 5G modem chips to be used on the new iPhone models to be released during the second half of 2023, up sharply from the 20% share that Qualcomm expected to fetch for the iPhone 15 line.
