Home > News

Power Chip Shortage Could Affect Apple iPhone 12 Delivery

By Laura Tucker
News Iphone 12 Chip Featured

Apple’s newest signature phone has already faced delivery problems, being released a month later than is typical because of the global health crisis. It’s could now be facing another delay. With the Apple iPhone 12 finally released and looking forward to the holiday season, a power chip shortage could leave buyers waiting.

Power Chip Shortage

It’s most likely not an accident that iPhones start shipping every year two months away from Black Friday. This is always Apple’s busiest quarter. Many have iPhone 12s on their wish list. But the handset may be held up this year.

It’s not clear how much the power chip shortage will affect iPhone 12 shipments, but it’s thought that Apple would find a way to be on top of any distribution list for who gets the parts first.

A variety of products has increased the demand for silicon, and the pandemic has affected the supply of many items. People with knowledge on the matter believe these two issues are behind the power chip shortage.

News Iphone 12 Chip 5g

Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said 5G smartphones require 30 to 40 percent more chip content than 4G. This demand and uncertainty over what will happen during the pandemic have caused customers to stockpile silicon components. Huawei did a massive stockpile before a September deadline ahead of United States sanctions.

iPhone 12 Power Chip Supply

The iPhone 12 requires more power management than earlier versions because of its additional camera features and the 5G capability. This places an increased need on the chips.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook issued a warning recently about the supply situation for the iPhone 12, as well as the Mac, iPad, and some Apple Watches. However, he did not specifically call out a power chip shortage in the iPhone 12.

He did say that supply issues for the iPhone are “not a surprise” because Apple is just ramping up its production. He explained “it’s hard to predict” how long the supply constraints on parts will last.

News Iphone 12 Chip Lock Screen

The company uses multiple power-management chip suppliers, according to iFixit. The iPhone 12 Pro uses a Texas Instruments Inc. chip for its camera system, a similar chip from STMicroelectronics NV, and one from Qualcomm for the 5G capability. A power-management chip designed by Apple is included in the iPhone 12 Pro as well.

There is question of how the iPhone 12 production will affect the demand in China after the worst quarterly revenue performance in six years. Investors are watching that the Apple handset doesn’t begin to lose out to more local rivals in China, such as Huawei and Xiaomi Corp.

Apple’s website shows that new iPhone 12 Pro orders won’t be arriving until late November or early December, while the iPhone 12 isn’t showing the same delay. It’s not known whether the power chip shortage is affecting the iPhone 12 Pro delay. If it’s not the reason, perhaps the phone will ship even later once the supply constraints catch up to it.

If you were lucky enough to get your hands on an iPhone 12 before the possible shortage, read on to find out whether a drop will damage the iPhone 12 glass display.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.