Apple has halted the production of its ARM-based M2 system on a chip (SoC) following what’s been described as plummeting MacBook sales, the Elec has reported. According to the South Korean publication, this is the first time that Apple has been prompted to stop chip production. Apple announced the M2 in June 2022, while this year saw the introduction of even more powerful SoCs in the form of the M2 Pro and M2 Max. A press release that Apple shared in January claimed that the new MacBook Pro features up to 6x faster performance than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro thanks to the updated hardware.
From The Elec (machine translation):
According to the Outsourcing Semiconductor Package Test (OSAT) industry on the 3rd, Taiwan’s TSMC did not send 5-nano process M2 chip wafer processing products to OSAT in January and February. It is believed that this is because Apple requested a halt to production as demand for the MacBook decreased. The M2 chip is finally processed through a general flip chip packaging process, unlike the A-series chips in the fan-out wafer-level package (FO-WLP) package method, which TSMC calls InFO (Integrated Fan Out). When TSMC completes the entire process, it will send the processed wafers to Amkor or Stats Chippack’s Korean factories for packaging. This stock did not exist in January or February. Although wafers have been coming in since March, an official familiar with the matter said that it was only half of the previous year.
The sluggish sales of Apple’s MacBook have already been predicted. “The PC market is facing a very challenging situation,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a conference call for the first quarter of the 2023 fiscal year (October-December 2022) held on February 2nd. I think we have a competitive advantage with silicon (M2 chip, etc.), but it will be very difficult in the short term.” Apple’s Mac PC business revenue in the first quarter was $7.7 billion. This is a 30% decrease compared to the same period last year. Since chip production was suspended in January and February, related business performance is expected to decline in the second quarter as well.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →Wow 6x is huge.
In very specific circumstances... The M2 is nice, but it ain't quite all that nice all the time. The battery life is what they should really be touting - the speed is there (mostly), but the battery life is out of this world great.
Problem with the M2 - as great as it is, it isn't all that much better than the M1. So all the people that jumped on the M1 have no real reason to jump to the M2. M1 was a huge leap forward, and a lot of people jumped on that bandwagon to see the benefits. Apple thought the upgrade wave would carry forward to the M2, but a lot of us with the M1 are perfectly happy. So a lot fewer people jumping on M2. It isn't that M2 is bad or the hardware is worse... just no big reason to upgrade if you already have an M1 and are happy with it.
From here on out, it will more or less follow the traditional Macintosh upgrade cycles: Apple hardware has extraordinary longevity, and most people I know who are Mac users easily go 2-3 generations (if not longer) between upgrades. We don't upgrade often, but being Apple, you spend when you do.
Apple should pull a samsung rabbit out of their hats. Why do expensive phones sell? Because people can buy them for 0 interest and pay for them unitl they are ready to replace them (on average 3 years.). Samsung is doing the same thing with their laptops and I'm seriously looking at their top of the line.
OR the M1 and M2 don't meet the needs of professionals requiring x86 based programs. A lot of software in business is x86 based.
In the medical world we don't support Mac's for this very reason. When some trendy doctor says they have a Mac we sell them RDP service to our term servers because their high priced p.o.s. can't run the EMR software they paid for.
Very true. That's always been an achilles' heel for Macintosh. Even when they were Intel based, you still had to either virtualize or boot camp - which wasn't too bad, but still not exactly seamless.
Although, our company uses RDP even for Windows based PCs (some Citrix crap), so with that the base hardware you are issued doesn't really matter that much - you just have to have good connectivity.
The fastest Intel MBP was the 14nm++++ 9880HK from Q2 2019. M2 should be faster than a 2.5 year old CPU. The 6x is for tasks with a dedicated coprocessor.