The car industry has fucked everyone over and noone is immune, regardless how big. If you're interested in how this happened, I wrote my understanding of it on another, related thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659709
That’s very interesting. My immediate reaction to the pandemic was less driving but by May ‘20 I too realized people will have to buy cars (outflow from urban areas and less public transit usage).
Yup, and it took a long time for journalism to describe Trump's falsehoods as lies because they merely thought him dumb or misinformed. It took a while for it to become apparent that he knew what he was saying was not true and that the correct term was that he was lying.
Yup, and it took a long time for journalism to describe Trump's falsehoods as lies because they merely thought him dumb or misinformed. It took a while for it to become apparent that he knew what he was saying was not true and that the correct term was that he was lying...
That's a pretty disingenuous take that completely ignores the lack of fabs and a global pandemic. Nobody knew what was going to happen and everybody made decisions that they regret. The industry is in the position it's in because of the sum total of decisions made by all actors over the last decade, not because the car companies made some forecasting mistakes. The car companies aren't the only ones who just-in-time their supply lines.
The car companies did this across the board to their entire supply chain.
In fact, I know some folks who relied on that business and had to close up shop because they basically had machines they bought specifically for auto manufacturers and they cancelled ALL their orders at the same time, with no ETA on when they would place the orders again.
They knew there was a pandemic, they knew the supply chain would be wonky and they just assumed it would start back up without delay when they were ready to make cars. They pushed the risk to their suppliers and when they went to place orders and everyone else had booked their capacity, laid off the employees or suppliers went out of business they were like "OMG HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!?".
Talking to some of the people I know, this is an unmitigated disaster that is entirely the auto manufacturers fault. There should be no sympathy for these idiots.
So there's a legitimate demand increase and supply disruption, and you are saying the explanation is that some companies canceled and then renewed orders?
Seems like the demand increase and supply disruption would explain a lot of it.
The other issue is the "car industry" doesn't order from fab. They order from a supplier of a module, who orders from a chip designer, who orders from a fab. And that's probably not accurate either as it leaves out plenty of middlemen.
How would this process have been different if the car manufactures didn't make this mistake? I am a layman, but after reading that it still sounds like increased demand and temporarily reduced supply for chips is the root cause and not the car industry failing to understand their own demand.
In practice people have been back in factories doing work since summer of last year. If we had changed absolutely nothing, then the "supply gap" would have been just those 3 months.
But what happened instead was everyone changed their plans for all of 2020/2021 and cancelled like all their orders. So everyone downstream handles that by shutting stuff down, firing people, etc. But 3 months later everyone shows back up and is like "oh wait no actually give us the normal production back". Meanwhile all your laid off staff is just working elsewhere.
I'm also a layman, but my feeling has been that the "stop everything! no wait start everything back up" has been way more of an issue than the actual production stoppage (which only was a couple of months! Remember how everyone was dragged back into work a couple months into the pandemic?)
I'm sure I'm extremely simplifying things here though and might be outright wrong though.
>If we had changed absolutely nothing, then the "supply gap" would have been just those 3 months.
It wouldn't work like that because demand increased and supply decreased at the same time creating a backlog that one would expect to last longer than the period of decreased supply.
Let's make up some numbers to show this. Imagine normal supply and demand is for 100 units per month. The pandemic hits and supply is now at 0, 25, and 50 for the next three months before returning to normal. Meanwhile demand goes to 75, 100, and then sticks at an elevated demand of 125. In those three months, the industry has produced 75 units, but the market needed 300 units creating a built up demand for an additional 225 units that doesn't simply go away. That backlog can never be satisficed as long as demand stays elevated and supply is normal. The suppliers actually have to increase production beyond both normal demand and current demand. Maybe they are able to adjust and produce 150 units per month starting in month four. That gives them a surplus of 25 units a month which means it is still another 9 months before all the built up demand is satisfied. It would therefore take a full year before the impact of that 3 month disruption dissipates.
That is obviously a rudimentary example, but it shows how a combination of decreased supply and increased demand can cause issues that last longer than the change on either side of the market.
Ermmmm, I don't understand how this is the "car industry fucking everyone over".
Even if what you wrote is true - it's just the market at work. If the car companies can pay enough to get slots in a fab and beat out smaller players so be it.
The demand for semiconductors currently exceeds supply. This means there will be shortages, price increases etc, until further capacity can be brought online or demand is lowered.
Also it's worth noting that "A can afford to pay a higher surcharge than B in order to get slots in a fab" essentially means "the consumers are voting with their wallets that getting A without delay is more important than getting B without delay".
Prices, and the willingness to tolerate an increase in them, is the ultimate signal of what people actually consider important, as opposed to just 'empty words' claims of importance.
part of what happened is described by the bullwhip effect[0], where oscillations in supply and demand essentially resonate as they ripple through the whole distribution channel. in this case, the effect was created and amplified primarily by the car industry, and thus their culpability in the supply crunch across industries.
the U.S., Japan and Germany have asked Taiwan and South Korea, the two key chip manufacturing economies, to help prioritize chips for the automotive industry, which is crucial to the world economy. This has further squeezed production of semiconductors for consumer electronics and computer products.
does "crucial to the world economy" mean consumer supply of automobiles (a.k.a jobs) or industrial use like in trucks, forklifts etc??
It means "crucial to automotive industry in these 3 countries, and it's important to politicians in those countries to look like they support their automotive industry". They need to do something, and it's not like they can do anything substantial that'll fix the problem now, so letter on highest level asking nicely it is.
depends - what if they favor a small industry over larger ones? (in the US the quintessential example is the coal industry vs. almost any other because of the insane way the government is elected)
How well did Wisconsin’s deal with FoxConn go? Politicians gave up something in the 7 figures per job that was ostensibly created on that project, but the state went into debt to do lots of the infra and the properties sit idle.
The F-35 is a defense project, but more than that, it is an unkillable jobs program distributed throughout nearly every Congressional district.
Politicians cite jobs created as if every “job” held equal weight. In fact, we have lost lots of salary jobs with benefits in the past decade, mostly replaced with independent contractor hours. Politicians don’t care because they are optimizing for the metric most commonly looked at.
Also, it creates a perverse incentive where no politician feels like they can ignore the bad metric because it is the good sound byte (a la “tough on crime” rhetoric when being consistent on crime is far more effective). Instead of working on healthier long term goals, they work on junk food goals.
But which provides more value to the economy over time? That such a large percentage of the economy was able to stop driving and work from home does say a lot about the value of computers today.
The iPad Pro with the trackpad keyboard is indeed more of a content consumption device than the typical office PC, but it's also more of a work creation device than the typical office PC, particularly if its user ever has to do work from a different chair.
And yet, the majority of the auto industry decided they should cancel their chip orders as soon as the pandemic hit because it might be an economic downturn.
Apple alone spends more money on semiconductors than the ENTIRE auto industry. They played stupid games and won stupid prizes with this chip shortage.
Their margins are much tighter than Apple’s. This outcome is far better than having a ton of unsold stock depreciating in dealer yards. That quickly leads to bankruptcy as it did in ‘08.
Limiting their downside risk was the right call given the information.
So now the auto manufacturers know they don't need to worry the next time it looks like there will be a downturn. They can cancel orders and if they turn out to be wrong just get on the phone to their favourite politician.
and then what? TSMC falls over itself because oh no, Merkel sent a letter, full focus on automotive chips? I doubt that has very much influence in how production is balanced.
Maybe more like: next time there’s a downturn, keep the orders if they can afford to. Having the chips on hand when the market picks up again could be a great investment, since they’ll be able to produce vehicles when their competitors can’t. Or they can sell some of the chips they’re holding to their competitors (at the going market rate).
also more money from tarfiffs, taxes, shipping, local assembly plants rather than offshore... moving massive machinery all over the world nonstop is really enormous compared to just about anything in retail
>> It means it supports a lot of jobs. Large auto plants can directly employ 10,000+ people.
> So do computers.
Computers don't directly employ anyone, yet.
Nitpicking aside, the vast bulk of the jobs enabled by computers in the US, Japan, and Germany will be completely unaffected by computer production delays. I'm guessing there's far more auto than computer production in those countries, so auto production difficulties have a more immediate effect.
Cars are being manufactured in the above countries. You can likely name one automotive city in those countries. Wolfsburg, Stuttgart, Detroit, Fremont and so on. The US, Japan and Germany are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest automotive producers in the world.
Consumer electronics tend to be manufactured elsewhere, so far from these countries' respective electorates that slave labour could assemble them for all they care. Their jobs are not on these countries' list of priorities.
Is software not manufacturing? How many software engineers are there in the US compared to auto workers?
All of this also ignores the larger economic picture— autos transport goods and people, computers are used to do work in nearly every field. They’re both instrumental to the economy.
I saw that too and I wondered how they accomplished that. Can a commercial grade line be tweaked produce more automotive grade parts? Or were they forced to take down entire lines and retool them? If so, that would definitely have... repercussions.
I think it is more crucial because most people only got the one car they need so once a car go out of use you need to immediatly manufactur a different one to fill up the gap.
With electronics it is a bit different, people hoard them and even if someone's tablet breakes there is a good chance that there is another one in the house or you can use a laptop instead or your phone or whatever.
I know of many people who have multiple cars but only one crucial electronic device that is a must-have. Your car can also likely be serviced faster than your computer or mobile phone, when either goes kaput. Your argument can go both ways.
Well I do know the the fire in Japan which wiped out a very important plant resulted in BMW shipping a brand new motorcycle without TPMS or even its radio. Worse for my dealer, they were were only allocated three the entire year, a dealer where they expected two dozen of that model.
Crucial as a definition in that the downstream effects are massive.
Personally I just picked up a Apple refurbished 2019 16” MacBook Pro - there’s still no M1X 16” model and there’s plenty of tools that don’t work on the arm Macs just yet (not that I don’t think Apple’s Herculean efforts with Rosetta 2 don’t solve the issue for MOST users).
I’ve been using a 16” MBP (i9) since it came out and man do I miss my old 2015 MBP. This 16” one cannot take a single 4K monitor plugged in! The fans go nuts and then things start hanging. And this is not a one-off, I’ve seen hundreds of reports online and also know my friends facing the same issue. It’s mind boggling how a machine this expensive has such major issues.
Hm, I have a 2018 15” from work and the 2019 16” I mentioned for personal use and neither have issues hooked up to my HP U28.
That said I’ll probably trade this in this with an arm model in a year or two after the ecosystem has had time to catch up, but I’m happy to have the Intel model for now.
My 2018 15” and 2019 16” could both handle two 4K monitors without turning on fans. And the 2018 model did have thermal issues in the summer, but not related to the basics like browsing. So far the 2019 model is much better. I don’t think yours is a common experience, though it sucks that it’s happening.
And what about the resale of value of pre-M1 Macs ? I just got an estimate of 400€ to fix a 6yo Mac Pro and I wonder if that's a pointless investment to make at this point.
> It's not like you can just push a button on your AWS console and get a new 5nm fab.
I have to admit that I really take for granted how easily it is to spin up additional capacity for projects nowadays. This statement put that into focus for me.
That said, at some point if this continues, the shortages will start to affect AWS, Azure, GCM, DO, Linode, OVH, etc. capacity. And that will get nasty fast.
5 days ago the data center my dedicated servers are in caught fire, and I was able to restore everything from back up to DO in 30 minutes. I would be so screwed if there is no capacity from on demand hosting providers.
The pandemic showed us that the supply chain is more frail than we think. I also just finished Wages of Destruction, about economics in Nazi Germany. And at last I explored the nooks and crannies of an abandoned hospital.
It's eye-opening to see how complex a large building is, with all its pipes, wiring, and shafts. That's without considering the satellite buildings, or the specialised equipment on the actual production line.
It's also surprising to see how much depends on components and raw materials produced thousands of kilometres away.
And at last, it becomes obvious that you can't just spin up a new factory, nor can you trivially retool one or re(al)locate thousands of its workers.
Scaling up demands feats of logistics. Scaling down can bring financial ruin to entire regions.
This draws interesting parallels to the production of vaccine. You can't just throw more people at it for the same reasons.
The current overall shortage in the wider ecosystem is not even limited to top-of-line 5nm parts, but the fundamental issue of "you can't just spin up a fab" remains of course.
> but the fundamental issue of "you can't just spin up a fab" remains of course.
Why not?
I mean... look at the current plague pandemic - we've been listening that you cannot just create more space in hospitals overnight, or build new rooms, and this and that... but it's not overnight... it's been a year now, and if they started building the first time they said "it cannot be done overnight", we'd have a lot of nice empty rooms now.
I remember waiting for some parts in 2002, that were delayed due to many stupid logistic issues in Korea (fifa world cup was there, then), and the excuse was the same... you cannot just make more factories overnight. Graphics card prices are overinflated, ram prices are inflated, ssd prices are inflated.... basically, anyone who starts building any form of production now, will be able to sell whatever the company puts out without issues.
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there is either some cartel deal between huge companies (intel, amd, nvidia, qualcomm,...), to keep prices artificially high and blame parts shortage, or they're all incompetent.
Me think you grossly under-estimate the complexity of creating a facility that processes basic inputs, a few chemicals, and lots of optics/lights to make state of the art nanometer scale 3D features at enormous volume and very low defect rates.
World cup in korea was in 2002... between then and now, many generations (sizes) of semicondctors have been 'invented' (..the method to produce them) and replaced with smaller ones.
There is a table on the right, and there are rougly 2-3 years between 'generations' - so 2-3 years between starting a new production line of top-of-the-line flagship (eg.) cpus, to making a new production line for even newer, "smaller" (transitors) cpus, and the old line making other, cheaper ones.
I'm not saying that Johnny Sixpack can do it in his garage, but companies like Intel, AMD, samsung, etc. surely could do it in that timeframe, because they're already doing it now.
I think the problem may be best addressed by spinning up ASML alternatives and other critical singular fail points/capabilities. Some things like this do rise to a national/global security threat.
Fabs are multi-year projects, and take quite a while to run a profit (since you first have to invest 10s of billions into building one). So "will be able to sell whatever" right now could still mean that the overall thing ends not very profitable once the competition recovers from their outages and finishes their expansion plans. And similarly, the supply chains for the equipment you need to actually build a fab don't magically scale, and are wary of doing so - because again, just because everyone wants their high-end fab equipment now doesn't mean they will in a few years, and they've been bitten by market contractions in the past, so they have little motivation to scale extremely and then struggle because they've satisfied demand. Their order books are basically full already, so you can't just go and equip your shiny new fab quickly. Even if they now wanted to expand more than they expected, them tooling up for faster production would take a while.
In the end, making chips just isn't that high on the overall list of things to be able to opt.out of normal market forces. If it looks like customers will pay enough to make rapid expansion and the changes necessary to enable such rapid expansion worth it, it'll happen.
But demand is not actually that much higher than normal, and thus the investment has limits. You can be sure that everyone is working to finish their expansions as fast as possible (hundreds of billions of investment over the next few years) and get their broken-down fabs back online ASAP, but its not like they suddenly can spend massively more resources on it. Compared to big challenges like fighting COVID its overall a minor concern, and as you point out even that did not go as all-out as it could have.
The main pinch-point is lithography machines, from what I have read. Companies like ASML [1] produce these room-sized machines to order, and the turnaround approaches 2 years from PO to delivery, depending on process node and wafer size.
The photolithography machines that you need in order to pattern silicon for etching features smaller than ~20 nm or so are made by one company -- ASML. One machine is about the size of a house, costs >$100 million, and their order book is full for at least the next two years.
A semiconductor fab typically needs several of these machines (maybe only one or two of the best machines for the smallest layers, but more of the coarser machines for the less dense layers) in order to produce chips competitively.
> I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there is either some cartel deal between huge companies (intel, amd, nvidia, qualcomm,...), to keep prices artificially high and blame parts shortage, or they're all incompetent.
So here's what actually happened. Car companies cancelled their orders because there was this thing called COVID. Those slots on fabs got sold to other people in the entertainment industry because at the time it was believed people would just stay at home and the entertainment sector would need the extra fabs.
In a sudden twist of what could be called "irony", it turns out people are scared of getting on public transit during and after covid so everyone who relied on that or uber/lyft started buying cars so demand for cars went up. Car companies tried buying their slots back kicking off a giant demand hike which basically had people buying fab slots for far more than they are worth... the issue is that those ICs aren't like a graphics card.
If you don't have 5nm chips, well that's fine, you can't produce a graphics card per IC, for a car, there could be dozens of different chips. If your 30nm chips are out of stock, it doesn't matter how many 105nm chips you have in stock, you can't sell half of a car.
Much of what is needed doesn't have to be 5nm though. IMO the fastest way to get more production capacity is blocked because of politics. Want more capacity as fast as possible (though that is still not exactly fast) on 5nm? Let China upgrade to better fabs and do the high nm work. But China is the evil enemy surpassing us in our own game so they gotta be held outside.
This has nothing to do with China. China is actually behind, Taiwan, South Korea, and the US in fab technology. China's best fabs are in 28nm area, not 5nm. This is why them getting cut off from western tech via the US's semiconductor sanctions was such a huge deal. They don't have their own fabs capable of making high end products.
No, they aren't at 28nm. They're shipping 14nm at volume, have low-volume R&D yields of 7nm, and are building their own EUV process for 5nm and below.
Sanctioning and restricting China is most certainly going to be a catalyst for a rapid development of domestic advancements (including, of course, surreptitiously stealing it from other countries/companies). Anyone who thinks China won't be right with the top makers in a few short years is fooling themselves.
I mean they're an autocratic country that co-opted our tech and cleverly used the greed of our corporations and investors to try to sling shot past us.
Then they want to use that new economic power and convert it to military power. Then use the military power to restart a civil war and take over peaceful countries like Taiwan.
Sounds kinda dumb to not try to stop that, lol. I don't think you want to live in a purely might makes right world.
By what metric? Clearly a country like Nazi Germany would’ve been a bit higher on the “might makes right” scale. Thus if you critically look at the CCP, you could see they are based on autocracy and will spread autocracy.
US is based on democracy with both oligarchal and free market capitalism.
The chips on short order are mostly quite old but specialized processes - most are 90nm and up in size. The advanced nodes aren’t very useful for moving power around.
Does everyone want 5nm? Would another fab tomorrow be useful? Who's actually shipping 5nm at volume except Apple right now? Are Huawei or were they forced elsewhere? Broadcom 5nm is barely going yet, neither AMD or Nvidia are shipping anything. I think that leaves just 5G stuff from Mediatek and Qualcomm. 7nm is what most of TSMC's customers want to get out the door.
Want or need? I have a dozen devices on my LAN that don’t use the latest tech. I get by. But if I was going to upgrade my laptop there’s a good chance it would be an M1.
Demand for Apple's M1 laptop isn't going to be a problem for TSMC if Apple is currently their only customer with volume production of 5nm parts. I'm trying to understand where the idea of any 5nm shortage comes from. The shortages described in this article are nothing to do with 5nm.
Those ASML EUV machines are like 100-200 million dollars apiece. I can't imagine what the lead time on something like that is. And of course you need people to run them, a space to run them in, and everything else. There can't be too many industries with bigger capital outlays than cutting-edge semi fab.
I don't understand your comment. Are you refuting that semiconductor fabrication is capital intensive? Are you comparing it somehow to building high schools? Like... what?
The new fab TSMC is building in Arizona is 12 BILLION DOLLARS - for a single fab.
That's 100 of these high schools for the price of a single fab facility.
Having said that, it is pretty remarkable that Apple has gotten themselves in a situation where a supplier has so much leverage over them. TSMC can set the prices and conditions and there isn't a lot anyone can do about it.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Would Airtags constrain supplies of other, higher value apple products? I have wondered about their delay, but could understand it in terms of their requiring components that would put even more pressure on other product lines.
I don't imagine Airtags have anything to do with this; reading the article it looks like ipads and laptops are being held up due to component shortage. It's painful to have a product announcement when you can't ship enough.
They wouldn't do a whole event just for Airtags (I would think...). More likely the event would be tied in with overdue iPad Pro refreshes, which are mentioned here as being supply constrained.
Long way to say yes, this could be part of why it seems like the unannounced but expected Apple event remained unannounced.
The Federal Government continually tells it citizens to stockpile at least enough water and food for a week in the event of emergencies, and most families don't have the means, either in space or disposable income, to do even that pathetic amount of preparedness.
The automotive industries in all three respective nations are enormous and could have taken a temporary hit on semiconductors by way of having to stockpile the chips and store them. Instead they fell prey to the age-old adage of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. I have zero sympathy for them. Every day when plants get shut down due to not enough semiconductors, the executives who made the decision should be telling workers, "Sorry we were greedy dumb shits who cared more about the millions of dollars we saved then, which are now costing us tens of millions now, not to mention shifts for those of you who are hourly workers."
Of course the caveat there is making the (idiotic) assumption they even care about those workers in the first place, we we know they don't.
It might be a little mean because of the first line, but I don't see it as combative, and it's not overly aggressive. So what if it sounds "aggressive", it's okay to have emotion and convey it. If I don't want to read it, then I just move on and let the writer be. There's no reason for me to tell the writer to change because I don't like how I perceive the writing's tone.
I think the writer should remove the first line, but the rest seems reasonable. The writer however is assuming what another person thinks with the last line, and I believe it is wrong to say that. (Was that an edited addition?)
Edit: I'm curious about peoples' reactions to my comment if any of you can please add an explanation along with the vote.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I thought I was replying to the arguement set forth by the person I was replying to, but I guess that's not what is meant.
Perhaps it means respond to the facts of the content and not how it was delivered? If that's the case, I think the rules should be clarified? @dang
I thought that being critical of one's opinion was not appropriate, so I was calling it out with my original comment. I guess I should have just flagged and moved on. It seems a shame though to not give the responder a chance to learn and grow though. That's why I asked for feedback, so that I could learn and grow. I think that's what many of us want from this website in addition to just otherwise boring tech news?
Edit: A Downvote don't tell me how I was/am wrong. I'm not mad about it, I just want to know why, otherwise the vote is meaningless to me.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you have substantive points to make, make them thoughtfully.
I checked a moment ago, and M1 MacBook Air delivery timelines for non-English keyboards haven't changed from where they were last week. I ordered one to see if it gets delayed. I think those would be the first to get impacted.
It'd be good to get some clarity from Apple before taking this delay as an established fact. Nikkei overhyped (IMO) the impact to Apple's supply chain in its coverage of iPhone inventory last year, at the very beginning of the pandemic.
from the article: “Overall, the component shortage remains a supply chain issue for Apple and has not yet had an impact on product availability for consumers, Nikkei has learned.”
Last time around, Apple started limiting the number of iPhones that a customer could add to cart, and also centralized its logistics by closing stores. They're unlikely to acknowledge delays proactively and will probably try to avoid making them visible.
1. Nikkei never had any good track record regarding general supply source, especially with TSMC. ( apart from those coming from Japan ).
2. The so called delay currently running in rumour mill were about "new" MacBook and iPad. aka those running on new 5nm M1 variant silicon. The delay is mostly due to the fact iPhone is selling better and all Apple's 5nm capacity is prioritising to iPhone. Mac and iPad can wait.
3. Somehow those same rumours got passed around enough to become current MacBook and iPad got production delayed.
Taking geopolitical consideration out of this, it just seems like it is bad for the global economy to concentrate any one competency in only one region. I am tired of the China is bad mmmkay song and dance. We need to move manufacturing to at least one other different continent for everyone’s sake...
We spent $63 billion over one year to cover payrolls for airlines in a demand nadir, but we get locked up when it comes to less money over more time toward semiconductors in a demand explosion. It's a textbook moral hazard.
> the U.S., Japan and Germany have asked Taiwan and South Korea, the two key chip manufacturing economies, to help prioritize chips for the automotive industry, which is crucial to the world economy.
I sure hope those in automotive industry ( which is pretty much everyone except Toyota ) paid a healthy premium for it.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadDefinition of “lie”:
> A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving someone
The car industry fucked up a forecast and cancelled based on their forecast. That’s not a lie.
The car companies did this across the board to their entire supply chain.
In fact, I know some folks who relied on that business and had to close up shop because they basically had machines they bought specifically for auto manufacturers and they cancelled ALL their orders at the same time, with no ETA on when they would place the orders again.
They knew there was a pandemic, they knew the supply chain would be wonky and they just assumed it would start back up without delay when they were ready to make cars. They pushed the risk to their suppliers and when they went to place orders and everyone else had booked their capacity, laid off the employees or suppliers went out of business they were like "OMG HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!?".
Talking to some of the people I know, this is an unmitigated disaster that is entirely the auto manufacturers fault. There should be no sympathy for these idiots.
Seems like the demand increase and supply disruption would explain a lot of it.
The other issue is the "car industry" doesn't order from fab. They order from a supplier of a module, who orders from a chip designer, who orders from a fab. And that's probably not accurate either as it leaves out plenty of middlemen.
But what happened instead was everyone changed their plans for all of 2020/2021 and cancelled like all their orders. So everyone downstream handles that by shutting stuff down, firing people, etc. But 3 months later everyone shows back up and is like "oh wait no actually give us the normal production back". Meanwhile all your laid off staff is just working elsewhere.
I'm also a layman, but my feeling has been that the "stop everything! no wait start everything back up" has been way more of an issue than the actual production stoppage (which only was a couple of months! Remember how everyone was dragged back into work a couple months into the pandemic?)
I'm sure I'm extremely simplifying things here though and might be outright wrong though.
It wouldn't work like that because demand increased and supply decreased at the same time creating a backlog that one would expect to last longer than the period of decreased supply.
Let's make up some numbers to show this. Imagine normal supply and demand is for 100 units per month. The pandemic hits and supply is now at 0, 25, and 50 for the next three months before returning to normal. Meanwhile demand goes to 75, 100, and then sticks at an elevated demand of 125. In those three months, the industry has produced 75 units, but the market needed 300 units creating a built up demand for an additional 225 units that doesn't simply go away. That backlog can never be satisficed as long as demand stays elevated and supply is normal. The suppliers actually have to increase production beyond both normal demand and current demand. Maybe they are able to adjust and produce 150 units per month starting in month four. That gives them a surplus of 25 units a month which means it is still another 9 months before all the built up demand is satisfied. It would therefore take a full year before the impact of that 3 month disruption dissipates.
That is obviously a rudimentary example, but it shows how a combination of decreased supply and increased demand can cause issues that last longer than the change on either side of the market.
Even if what you wrote is true - it's just the market at work. If the car companies can pay enough to get slots in a fab and beat out smaller players so be it.
The demand for semiconductors currently exceeds supply. This means there will be shortages, price increases etc, until further capacity can be brought online or demand is lowered.
I don't think there's any "bad guys" here.
Prices, and the willingness to tolerate an increase in them, is the ultimate signal of what people actually consider important, as opposed to just 'empty words' claims of importance.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect
How well did Wisconsin’s deal with FoxConn go? Politicians gave up something in the 7 figures per job that was ostensibly created on that project, but the state went into debt to do lots of the infra and the properties sit idle.
The F-35 is a defense project, but more than that, it is an unkillable jobs program distributed throughout nearly every Congressional district.
Politicians cite jobs created as if every “job” held equal weight. In fact, we have lost lots of salary jobs with benefits in the past decade, mostly replaced with independent contractor hours. Politicians don’t care because they are optimizing for the metric most commonly looked at.
Also, it creates a perverse incentive where no politician feels like they can ignore the bad metric because it is the good sound byte (a la “tough on crime” rhetoric when being consistent on crime is far more effective). Instead of working on healthier long term goals, they work on junk food goals.
Probably the thing that's not another iPad (e.g. the luxury content consumption device).
B) iPad can be used for work, studying and much more, not only consumption
Apple alone spends more money on semiconductors than the ENTIRE auto industry. They played stupid games and won stupid prizes with this chip shortage.
Limiting their downside risk was the right call given the information.
> So do computers.
Computers don't directly employ anyone, yet.
Nitpicking aside, the vast bulk of the jobs enabled by computers in the US, Japan, and Germany will be completely unaffected by computer production delays. I'm guessing there's far more auto than computer production in those countries, so auto production difficulties have a more immediate effect.
Computer production is just one part of the economic puzzle. The real question is what economic activity do computers and automobiles enable.
Yes, but auto plants do directly employ people.
Consumer electronics tend to be manufactured elsewhere, so far from these countries' respective electorates that slave labour could assemble them for all they care. Their jobs are not on these countries' list of priorities.
All of this also ignores the larger economic picture— autos transport goods and people, computers are used to do work in nearly every field. They’re both instrumental to the economy.
With electronics it is a bit different, people hoard them and even if someone's tablet breakes there is a good chance that there is another one in the house or you can use a laptop instead or your phone or whatever.
Crucial as a definition in that the downstream effects are massive.
OP I highly recommend taking a marketing class to defend yourself from companies like Tesla and Apple.
That said I’ll probably trade this in this with an arm model in a year or two after the ecosystem has had time to catch up, but I’m happy to have the Intel model for now.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...
I have to admit that I really take for granted how easily it is to spin up additional capacity for projects nowadays. This statement put that into focus for me.
That said, at some point if this continues, the shortages will start to affect AWS, Azure, GCM, DO, Linode, OVH, etc. capacity. And that will get nasty fast.
The pandemic showed us that the supply chain is more frail than we think. I also just finished Wages of Destruction, about economics in Nazi Germany. And at last I explored the nooks and crannies of an abandoned hospital.
It's eye-opening to see how complex a large building is, with all its pipes, wiring, and shafts. That's without considering the satellite buildings, or the specialised equipment on the actual production line.
It's also surprising to see how much depends on components and raw materials produced thousands of kilometres away.
And at last, it becomes obvious that you can't just spin up a new factory, nor can you trivially retool one or re(al)locate thousands of its workers.
Scaling up demands feats of logistics. Scaling down can bring financial ruin to entire regions.
This draws interesting parallels to the production of vaccine. You can't just throw more people at it for the same reasons.
Why not?
I mean... look at the current plague pandemic - we've been listening that you cannot just create more space in hospitals overnight, or build new rooms, and this and that... but it's not overnight... it's been a year now, and if they started building the first time they said "it cannot be done overnight", we'd have a lot of nice empty rooms now.
I remember waiting for some parts in 2002, that were delayed due to many stupid logistic issues in Korea (fifa world cup was there, then), and the excuse was the same... you cannot just make more factories overnight. Graphics card prices are overinflated, ram prices are inflated, ssd prices are inflated.... basically, anyone who starts building any form of production now, will be able to sell whatever the company puts out without issues.
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there is either some cartel deal between huge companies (intel, amd, nvidia, qualcomm,...), to keep prices artificially high and blame parts shortage, or they're all incompetent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...
There is a table on the right, and there are rougly 2-3 years between 'generations' - so 2-3 years between starting a new production line of top-of-the-line flagship (eg.) cpus, to making a new production line for even newer, "smaller" (transitors) cpus, and the old line making other, cheaper ones.
I'm not saying that Johnny Sixpack can do it in his garage, but companies like Intel, AMD, samsung, etc. surely could do it in that timeframe, because they're already doing it now.
In the end, making chips just isn't that high on the overall list of things to be able to opt.out of normal market forces. If it looks like customers will pay enough to make rapid expansion and the changes necessary to enable such rapid expansion worth it, it'll happen.
But demand is not actually that much higher than normal, and thus the investment has limits. You can be sure that everyone is working to finish their expansions as fast as possible (hundreds of billions of investment over the next few years) and get their broken-down fabs back online ASAP, but its not like they suddenly can spend massively more resources on it. Compared to big challenges like fighting COVID its overall a minor concern, and as you point out even that did not go as all-out as it could have.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
A semiconductor fab typically needs several of these machines (maybe only one or two of the best machines for the smallest layers, but more of the coarser machines for the less dense layers) in order to produce chips competitively.
So here's what actually happened. Car companies cancelled their orders because there was this thing called COVID. Those slots on fabs got sold to other people in the entertainment industry because at the time it was believed people would just stay at home and the entertainment sector would need the extra fabs.
In a sudden twist of what could be called "irony", it turns out people are scared of getting on public transit during and after covid so everyone who relied on that or uber/lyft started buying cars so demand for cars went up. Car companies tried buying their slots back kicking off a giant demand hike which basically had people buying fab slots for far more than they are worth... the issue is that those ICs aren't like a graphics card.
If you don't have 5nm chips, well that's fine, you can't produce a graphics card per IC, for a car, there could be dozens of different chips. If your 30nm chips are out of stock, it doesn't matter how many 105nm chips you have in stock, you can't sell half of a car.
How does Huawei get those new chips at 7nm?
Sanctioning and restricting China is most certainly going to be a catalyst for a rapid development of domestic advancements (including, of course, surreptitiously stealing it from other countries/companies). Anyone who thinks China won't be right with the top makers in a few short years is fooling themselves.
Then they want to use that new economic power and convert it to military power. Then use the military power to restart a civil war and take over peaceful countries like Taiwan.
Sounds kinda dumb to not try to stop that, lol. I don't think you want to live in a purely might makes right world.
There'd be no more "might makes right" with PRC as the biggest superpower compared to the US. Just a different kind.
By what metric? Clearly a country like Nazi Germany would’ve been a bit higher on the “might makes right” scale. Thus if you critically look at the CCP, you could see they are based on autocracy and will spread autocracy.
US is based on democracy with both oligarchal and free market capitalism.
For example Pinole Valley High School https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/04/14/west-contra-costa-sc...
Google says Contra Costa County has nine high schools.
The new fab TSMC is building in Arizona is 12 BILLION DOLLARS - for a single fab.
That's 100 of these high schools for the price of a single fab facility.
Half joking
Having said that, it is pretty remarkable that Apple has gotten themselves in a situation where a supplier has so much leverage over them. TSMC can set the prices and conditions and there isn't a lot anyone can do about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Long way to say yes, this could be part of why it seems like the unannounced but expected Apple event remained unannounced.
The Federal Government continually tells it citizens to stockpile at least enough water and food for a week in the event of emergencies, and most families don't have the means, either in space or disposable income, to do even that pathetic amount of preparedness.
The automotive industries in all three respective nations are enormous and could have taken a temporary hit on semiconductors by way of having to stockpile the chips and store them. Instead they fell prey to the age-old adage of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. I have zero sympathy for them. Every day when plants get shut down due to not enough semiconductors, the executives who made the decision should be telling workers, "Sorry we were greedy dumb shits who cared more about the millions of dollars we saved then, which are now costing us tens of millions now, not to mention shifts for those of you who are hourly workers."
Of course the caveat there is making the (idiotic) assumption they even care about those workers in the first place, we we know they don't.
I think the writer should remove the first line, but the rest seems reasonable. The writer however is assuming what another person thinks with the last line, and I believe it is wrong to say that. (Was that an edited addition?)
Edit: I'm curious about peoples' reactions to my comment if any of you can please add an explanation along with the vote.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A few lines seem to apply. Specifically:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I thought I was replying to the arguement set forth by the person I was replying to, but I guess that's not what is meant.
Perhaps it means respond to the facts of the content and not how it was delivered? If that's the case, I think the rules should be clarified? @dang
I thought that being critical of one's opinion was not appropriate, so I was calling it out with my original comment. I guess I should have just flagged and moved on. It seems a shame though to not give the responder a chance to learn and grow though. That's why I asked for feedback, so that I could learn and grow. I think that's what many of us want from this website in addition to just otherwise boring tech news?
Edit: A Downvote don't tell me how I was/am wrong. I'm not mad about it, I just want to know why, otherwise the vote is meaningless to me.
Because the company loses cash, not the personal bank account
And it would be hilarious to say that knowing it is consequences free to a bunch of non- or small- shareholders
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26744837.
It'd be good to get some clarity from Apple before taking this delay as an established fact. Nikkei overhyped (IMO) the impact to Apple's supply chain in its coverage of iPhone inventory last year, at the very beginning of the pandemic.
2. The so called delay currently running in rumour mill were about "new" MacBook and iPad. aka those running on new 5nm M1 variant silicon. The delay is mostly due to the fact iPhone is selling better and all Apple's 5nm capacity is prioritising to iPhone. Mac and iPad can wait.
3. Somehow those same rumours got passed around enough to become current MacBook and iPad got production delayed.
We spent $63 billion over one year to cover payrolls for airlines in a demand nadir, but we get locked up when it comes to less money over more time toward semiconductors in a demand explosion. It's a textbook moral hazard.
I sure hope those in automotive industry ( which is pretty much everyone except Toyota ) paid a healthy premium for it.