

Memory shortage haunts Apple’s blowout iPhone sales
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. So iPhone buyers aren’t waiting around for better artificial-intelligence features. For Apple that is both good and bad news.
The good news was readily apparent in the company’s fiscal first-quarter results late Thursday. iPhone revenue surged 23% year over year to more than $85 billion. That was well ahead of Wall Street’s expectations and the best December-quarter growth for Apple’s largest business segment in more than a decade.
Growth was so good, in fact, that Apple is struggling to keep up. During its conference call, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company depleted much of its inventory during the quarter and is now in “supply chase mode" to get more produced. And that is proving to be a challenge—even given Apple’s well-known prowess at wrangling its supply chain.
The company admitted, for instance, that it is having trouble getting enough production capacity for the most advanced processing chips that power its latest products. Taiwanese chip-making titan TSMC is Apple’s main producer of those chips. But TSMC is also the main producer of AI chips for companies such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
And the red-hot demand and high prices those chips command are leaving little spare room for other product segments in a finite number of production lines. Smartphone chips fell from 38% of TSMC’s revenue in 2023 to 29% last year, according to the company’s latest earnings report this month. Apple still managed to project total revenue growth of 13% to 16% for the March-ending quarter, which beat the 10% analysts had been expecting, according to FactSet estimates.
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