“We’ve been hearing several reports that the launch of the iPhone 8 could be delayed compared to previous years,” Benjamin Mayo reports for 9to5Mac. “Reputable Apple analyst KGI Ming-Chi Kuo has also weighed in today, reporting that mass production of the OLED iPhone will likely be pushed back to October/November, instead of the normal August/September timeframe for new iPhone launches.”
“KGI says the reason for the production difficulties is that the new iPhone 8 includes several major cutting-edge components that Apple has custom-ordered,” Mayo reports. “The analyst still expects the iterative ‘7S’ models to launch on the normal schedule.”
“KGI says that a delay of one to two months for the production ramp of iPhone 8 will hurt Apple’s calendar 2017 sales as customers will want to wait for the shiny new device to be available,” Mayo reports. “KGI blames several ‘significant hardware upgrades’ in the iPhone 8 for the delays. This includes a custom OLED display panel, a custom Apple A11 10-nanometer SoC, an all-new designed 3D Touch module and 3D sensing cameras.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This highlights the danger (and stupidity) of continuing to contract components from your number one competitor. If we were Samsung, we’d start delivering the displays next Easter. Whatever contractual hits they’ll take could be made up with Galaxy S8 sales. It’s like Arsenal buying goals from Chelsea in a match against each other. If Chelsea delivers, they get paid; if they don’t, oh well, they win.
Apple, if they’d sufficiently planned ahead, would have cut the serial patent- and trade dress-infringing Samsung out of their supply chain altogether years ago. Apple has $260+ billion dollars on hand. They could have developed the technology and built twenty OLED factories to produce the displays they need (when two or three would have sufficed; they’d still have over $200 billion lying around).
Instead, they are once again beholden to an arch-rival and they have very little leverage.
That said, luckily for Apple, most iPhone Day One-ers will simply wait and purchase the new flagship whenever it’s finally available.
An, yes, we’ve been talking about this for years:
Here’s hoping Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to kick some Samsung ass someday, for a change, and is working very hard to alleviate, not maintain, or Jobs forbid, increase, Apple’s dependence on Samsung going forward. If not, perhaps Tim Cook, not to mention Apple shareholders, should “wake up.”
Here’s a question for Apple Inc. shareholders to ask their employee, Mr. Cook (tcook@apple.com): On which planet do companies get paid billions to stamp out parts for competitors’ products and then, once they’re assembled, turn around and repeatedly piss all over them while churning out an unending stream of knockoffs of the very products that they publicly denigrate?
(Obviously, and unfortunately, Mr. Cook thinks that planet is named “Earth.”)
Here’s a shorter question for Apple Inc. shareholders to ask their employee, Mr. Cook: “WTF are you doing any business at all with Samsung?”
Did Mr. Cook, operations genius, really get Apple so dependent on one company that Apple cannot live without them?
Samsung has been ripping off Apple for nearly half a decade now. How long, exactly, does it take to stop doing business with them? – MacDailyNews Take, April 26, 2012
—
You want to know what’s really unbelievable? That, after half a decade, at least, of Samsung’s slavish copying, Apple continues to do billions of dollars of business with Samsung. Apple, which has enough money to build or bankroll anything they want, like a chip fab, or a touch screen display factory, or anything they could ever need.
“Oh, you copied our iPhone, our iPod touch, our iOS home screen, our icons, and our Mac mini? Here’s another three endless German lawsuits and, oh yeah, by the way, a $10 billion contract for touch screens.”
Something just does not compute here. If you get mugged, do you buy the leather for a new wallet from your mugger while pressing charges? If you’re Tim Cook, you do.
Apple could have – and should have – dropped Samsung like a bad habit years ago. Not one red cent should be going from Apple to Samsung today. It’s a travesty. It’s poor planning. And it’s bad business. The only conclusion we can draw is that Tim Cook, operations genius, boxed Apple in and is now stuck; beholden to a den of thieves. That sort of “decision making” doesn’t bode well for Apple’s future. It really doesn’t.
Here’s the question Walt Mossberg should have asked Cook onstage at D10: “Excuse me, Tim, but WTF are you still doing any business at all with Samsung?”
Wouldn’t you love to hear the answer to that one? Walt could use Keynote to flash all of Samsung’s knockoffs of Apple’s designs on the big screen behind Tim while he sputtered and stammered.
Next shareholders’ meeting or conference call, somebody might want to ask Mr. Cook that one. – MacDailyNews Take, June 1, 2012
SEE ALSO:
Apple signs two-year contract with Samsung for up to 92 million OLED iPhone displays – April 7, 2017
Apple may delay launch of flagship OLED ‘iPhone 8’ as late as November – April 5, 2017
Apple orders 70 million OLED panels for next-gen flagship iPhone – April 3, 2017
Uh-Huh… Here we go again Johnny Appleseeds with the same old worn out Apple song and their tiring dance. First, rumors of technical design problems and delayed production, followed by product announcement, then online pre-orders on a frozen Apple web site, followed by long lines early in the morning to limited stock at your local Apple store.
Tell me something new, Apple? Tell me something new! Tim?…
I think WTH (as in Why The Hell) is a better mnemonic than WTF in this case. So “why the hell” HAS Apple kept such a corrupt thieving incendiary device company in their Cupertino Loop?
Because they have no choice. The alternative is to not make an OLED display or wait another year or longer.
No.1 most likely reason is there is no other single manufacturer can respond to the size of Apple’s order. The alternative would be to seek multiple manufacturers and be able to coordinate them all in addition to making sure quality is consistent across the sources.
As for Apple actually handling manufacturing itself, based on what we know, it goes against Apple’s culture of sticking solely to design and outsourcing all manufacturing including all the problems that go with it. Staying away from doing it in-house also keeps their ‘eco-friendliness’ pristine after all.
MDN – Monday morning quarterbacking as always. Never change MDN, never change.
How the fuck is it “Monday morning quarterbacking,” when they’ve been telling Cook to “drop Samsung like a bad habit years ago” at least half a decade ago?
“Monday morning quarterbacking” means “criticizing the actions or decisions of others after the fact, using hindsight to assess situations and specify alternative solutions.”
MDN has been telling Apple/Cook that relying on Samsung is illogical and a mistake before the fact, using foresight to assess situations and specify alternative solutions.”
Don’t be a stupid fuck, jarhead.
You need to look up the meaning of “Monday morning quarterbacking” before you try to use it again.
What MDN has done here is precisely the opposite of that. If Cook had followed MDN’s advice from half a decade ago(!), he’d have iPhone 8 OLED displays ready to go whenever he needed them and he would not be dependent on and paying his main competitor billions of dollars.
In fact, if Cook had followed MDN’s advice from half a decade ago(!), we’d have iPhone with OLED displays in them already.
Instead, Pipeline Timmy blew tons of cash on synthetic sapphire that went bankrupt.
I don’t recall it costing all that much compared to Apple’s financial resources. I believe that it was around $400M with some of that to be recovered from selling the sapphire furnaces and such.
Besides, people like you need to make up your minds. Do you want innovation and “insanely great” products? If so, then the R&D process includes a lot of risks. Many of the lines of inquiry may not pan out, but one or two successes out of hundreds of attempts is all that it takes to change the world. If you are going to blast Apple because the company lost some money attempting to produce sapphire displays for mobile devices at large scale, then you are being hypocritical.
There are lots of talkers on this forum, including the current crop of MDN caretakers. Damn, I miss SteveJack, the only person around here with the same type of inspiration and foresight as Steve Jobs.
Spewing out “advice” is easy, “Factchecker.” The execution is what separates analysts and pundits from people who actually accomplish things.
It is easy to say, “dump Samsung,” but it is much more difficult to accomplish. As stated above, Apple now needs a couple of hundred million components a year to satisfy its iPhone production alone. Few companies can produce even a fraction of that production, and sourcing from a large number of manufacturers can lead to problems and headaches.
Delay of a new Mac Pro/mini is monumentally more important than this reported iPh delay. Years compared to months! New MP needs to be astronomically good.
Stop the buybacks, build the display, chip making on shore, 25 billion price tag over 3 years.
Danox: “… build the display, chip making on shore…”
Eventually, perhaps. But that is adding yet another hurdle onto an already challenging supply chain situation.
And the Samsung S8 is available NOW. All rumors so far (which historically have ended up being true) have the iPhone 8 as a near clone of the S8.
iPhone 7S?! Seriously Apple? You’re going to lead off New iPhone Season with the 4th year of the iPhone 6 design? Please let that be wrong. These are the Dark Times for Apple fans.
Apple obviously has struggled under Tim Cook to release new products on their expected date, but do you think Apple actually cares that much anymore? Iterations are smaller incremental improvments than they were in the past and Cook obviously wants to extend production cycles. He doesn’t have a sense of urgency on any product release.
So while everyone is expecting a supercycle like the iPhone 6 was when it introduced a massive improvement over all prior iPhones, the more likely scenario is that Apple will happily force the bleeding edge buyers to wait. Apple knows some of us aren’t going jump immediately for OLED or wireless charging — all those were available on Samsung devices and MDN categorically called them junk. Now when Apple contracts with Samsung to provide the same technologies to Apple’s iPhone, the hype machine expects Apple to sell the latest model by the tens of millions. I doubt it, Apple’s older models are actually selling very well.
When Apple finally releases a new fashionista Samsung-enabled flagship phone, a good portion of Apple customers will keep buying 6S models for the phone jack, or 5E models for the 4″ screen or price.
They say in Japan, to follow the next marketing trend, follow the purchasing patterns of High school girls. If that is an indicator, my nieces that have iPhones are considering ignoring the 7 and 8 series completely due to lack of an earphone jack, which doesn’t seem promising for future upgrades from that sector.
With the so-called analysts efforts to sway their investors with a fallacy of the Apple super cycle they concocted, they have effectively created a climate that suppresses iPhone 7s sales and makes it seems Apple missed, instead of the truth. That the analysts missed in their made up Apple release cycle.