Apple has scaled back production of its M2 chip, which powers its Mac devices, as sales have dipped. Reports indicate that the pause took place in January and February before resuming in March at half the rate of M1 chip production during the same period last year. Although Apple has not made any official statements about the production halt, supply chain reports indicate that the company’s third-party suppliers and vendors have felt the pinch as a result. Some firms that perform post-fabrication work on the wafers from TSMC before they’re installed in Macs at other assemblers have not received any M2 wafers from TSMC in January or February.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook says that the decline in Mac sales is in line with expectations, but if the roughly 30% decline in Mac sales was expected, there shouldn’t have been a pause in chip production. Reports suggest that the M1 lineup, including the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro models in addition to the M1 MacBook Air, might have produced a level of market saturation that dampened excitement for Apple’s M2-series Mac products. Apple’s latest Macs are not much better than the M1-series chips they are replacing, and if you’ve spent $3,000 to $4,000 dollars on an M1 Max MacBook Pro, you’re not going to spend that same amount of money a second time less than two years later for a performance boost of 10-15% in most cases.
As for why sales of Apple’s latest Macs would be slower than in the previous year, the company also faced a challenging macroeconomic environment and foreign exchange headwinds, which Cook acknowledged. The pause in chip production could threaten the business interests of suppliers like Amcona, who had a line completely dedicated to Apple chip packaging that sat idle for two months. It remains to be seen whether a possible M2 iMac at WWDC 2023 will generate the excitement that the M1 chips did back in 2020 and 2021, or whether the new iMac (2023) will launch with a new 3nm M3 chip later this year.
