“Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has begun shipping the computing brains used in smartphones and tablets to Apple Inc., highlighting the U.S. company’s continued push to diversify its suppliers,” Lorraine Luk reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“TSMC began shipping its first batch of microprocessors to the Cupertino, Calif., company in the second quarter, people familiar with the matter said, supplanting Samsung Electronics Co., which had a lock on the orders for the chips until last year,” Luk reports. “TSMC and Apple have also agreed to work together on more advanced chips next year, according to a person familiar with the situation. Although Apple contracted with TSMC for the chips last year in a landmark deal, some analysts were skeptical that the Taiwanese chip maker, the world’s biggest contract chip maker by revenue, could deliver the complicated chips.”
“For Samsung, the move is a setback as it had been the exclusive supplier of microprocessors to Apple since the first iPhone was launched in 2007. It comes just as the South Korean company’s chip business is starting to feel the impact from a slowdown in smartphone sales. Samsung said Tuesday that its operating earnings in the latest second quarter likely fell by as much as 26.5% from a year earlier, hit by a glut of unsold smartphones,” Luk reports. “Their relationship began to deteriorate in 2011 when Apple sued Samsung in a U.S. court alleging that Samsung copied the technology giant’s smartphone and tablet designs… Apple no longer buys iPhone screens from Samsung and has reduced iPad-screen purchases, suppliers say. Since 2012, Apple has also shifted some memory-chip orders from Samsung to other Asian chip makers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The more thermonuclear hits Samsung takes to their bottom line, the better.
Samsung makes and markets cheap, plastic, antiquated 32-bit crap with an off-the-shelf OS that was originally meant to be a BlackBerry knockoff but was hastily rejiggered to resemble Apple’s revolutionary iPhone.
Don’t settle for a POS Suzuki Samurai when you really wanted the One and Only Jeep.
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
Here’s what cellphones looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
