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Comment by j-pb | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one bothered that the largest pure play fab in the world is degraded to an apple supplier. This has consequences far beyond apple.

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I think all headlines should be written like this. It adds a nice distopia undertone:

Water feature near Apple’s new cupertino headquarters set to rise tens of feet over the next century, displacing engineers in low lying areas.

Political instability set to double the prices of raw materials used in domestically produced Mac Pros; iPhones largely unaffected.

Suspected cancer link discovered with cafeteria subcontractor Monsanto’s Roundup. Rumors suggest Apple will move to in house agricultural production. Monsanto down 5 points.

Orchards and markets around the world continue to blatantly dilute Apple's trademark.

"Hey, kid, don't bite that Apple®!"

Who knew paperclip maximization could be distopian...

Yep, this is a pretty odd way to describe TSMC especially considering that Apple doesn’t even consume a large percentage of capacity. 3rd largest semiconductor company in the world, largest none-affiliated fab, first to roll out a 7nm process node and degraded to an “Apple supplier”, but I guess Bloomberg needs a hook for readers to care.

I think an even better headline would be "World's biggest contract fab shutdown by virus" but I can't change it now.

What's a better, concise way to describe TSMC? I think "World's biggest contract fab" can probably be improved on.

Chip makers who fabricate fabless companies' chips are called 'Foundries'.

Yes, the connection is weird.

Prompted me to look up the numbers though. Apple could buy TSMC for cash, four times over... pretty incredible.

Holy... this _is_ incredible.

No, they can't. Nobody will sell them TSMC, and even if they will, Chinese govt will shut that down.

Just to check, are you saying the government of the Peoples Republic of China will shut that down, or the government of the Republic of China?

Taiwan is the latter. Taiwanese people consider themselves Chinese (both ethnically and nationally).

Except of course for the aboriginal Taiwanese, who viewed Chiang Kai-Shek and company to be occupiers.

I would also suggest that saying the people of Taiwan consider themselves to be Chinese, ethnically and nationally, is true but not so helpful, given that the other China is similarly full of people who consider themselves to be Chinese, ethnically and nationally. What you said is true, but missing an awful lot of important distinction.

Well, better occupy than exterminate like in The US. Even before CKS there were ethnic Chinese that migrated to the island long before.

I’ve never heard anyone from Taiwan refer to their government as the “Chinese government”

Well their passport has “Republic of China” printed on it. They officially have a claim over the physical land of Mainland China but deny mainland Chinese citizenship. For practical purposes most people would refer to it as Taiwan so as not to confuse laymen.

I call BS on that

Regarding the 2019 Taiwan Independence referendum, the Foundation’s data shows that 20.7% of the population are incredibly in favor of the vote and 28.8% generally approve, indicating that over half of the population support the referendum.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3385076

Most Taiwanese consider Taiwan, China separate countries, poll suggests

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...

Nearly 70 percent of Taiwanese are willing to go to war if China were to attempt to annex Taiwan by force

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2018/04/20/20...

How do you call BS? Yes of course they consider the two separate countries. The issue isn’t that. The issue is which country is the historical continuation of “China” after WWII, and that’s not even what I’m talking about. I’m talking about ethnic and national identity; the argument over which government of China is legitimate was not part of the conversation.

Taiwanese people are Chinese people, as is much of Singapore and Hong Kong.

I’m not sure what your referendum links have to do with anything.

I meant another China, but given how NXP case went, nothing is impossible these days.

Apple can buy anyone but it doesn’t matter, TSMC produces nearly 20 million wafers a year, Apple is a dip in the ocean when it comes to their production capacity.

I was just going to say that. Seriously, wtf - this is as if the Apple hipsters had now their summer ruined and not at all the entire CPU & GPU supply for pretty much everything was jeopardized ...

Intel have their own fabs. AMD are primarily a GlobalFoundries customer (GF was spun off from AMD in 2009) but do source some dies from TSMC. Nvidia are primarily a TSMC customer, but Reuters have reported that they have contracted Samsung to produce 14nm dies.

Lost production at TSMC is a serious issue, but it's not cataclysmic for the supply chain as a whole.

The new 7nm Rome is expected to exclusively use TSMC, but this won't affect that production. Samsung and Nvidia would be the most affected, but apparently most of TSMC's facilities are already back up with the remaining to be up by tomorrow. So less than 2 days lost production probably will not significantly affect anyone. It's a good thing this wasn't a targeted attack with a payload to damage hardware and put them out for weeks or more. That would have serious repercussions.

AFAIK Qualcomm is going to TSMC for its nexgen, which is far more chips than even Apple gets.

How can we assume that the other fabs have spare capacity to soak up new ex-TSMC work?

Did Samsung boot other customers or products so NVidia could stay afloat? I’m sure NVidia’s margins are high enough to get others to slow down their output.

This kind of issue happens in pharmaceuticals all the time: one factory goes down, the others can’t soak up the extra orders, and months down the line we start running out of finished product after the warehouse gets emptied.

The TSMC factories are mostly back online though. At worst theres just a one week delay on lead times now.

We've taken that bit out of the title.

Tech is Apple and Apple is tech...

I have long noticed that Apple "related" news make it to front pages that usually do not carry any tech news at all.

My understanding for why this happens is that media outlets are old school Apple strongholds. In large part because the current generation of media people have been educated by a generation that learned their trade by rote on gray scale Macs.

Mental inbreeding, basically...

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