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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

This leads me to wonder about the microprocessor shortage.

So many computing devices such as Nvidia Jetson and Raspberry Pi are simply not available anywhere. I wonder what's he point of bringing out new products when existing products can't be purchased? Won't the new products also simply not be available?

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The products don't get produced in order. The high value products get priority and continuously bump out low value chips like those on the RPI. Not sure what the cost of this Grace chip is but it looks to be targeting high value users so it gets priority. Notice how there is no shortage of chips for iPhones, because Apple just buys the capacity at whatever cost it takes.

Though, there is a shortage of m1 MacBooks. Is it really because they are low value (margin?) products relative to iPhone? I'm not sure.

Not much of a shortage. I just checked and they are all available for pickup right now at my local small city store. Compared to other products they are still extremely available.

Interesting, I see nothing available from store.apple.com until 6 April earliest, and 29 April for m1 max and even later depending on options.

A month is not a long time these days..

Specifying the M1 max = you are ordering a custom machine = there is a delay because a factory has to build it for you. The machines that are available for immediate pickup are the base level specs as shown on apple.com.

That's pretty common I think. The retailers get their orders in and planned well before consumers can.

In some cases you're finding far flung regions relative to the source having better availability, because they were allocated a percentage of the original supply but are also too far away for scalpers to be interested, so they just haven't gone through it as fast. Australia hasn't had too many troubles with some items that are pretty hard to get elsewhere for example. Getting a 3080 in NYC is probably a real challenge, but I can walk to my local parts store and pick one up no dramas.

I bought an M1 Macbook Air mid-February. The site gave me a ship date of four weeks later, but actually shipped from China in eight days, and arrived at my office a couple days later.

Given what a mess shipping has been for the last two years, they appear to be taking the "underpromise, overdeliver" route on shipping quotes.

I was pretty surprised by the low prices of m1 macbooks when even the lowest end models perform so much better than the high end of previous models. I'm sure Apple is spending less money on manufacturing them now that they're not going through Intel, but I would have expected them to just keep charging the same and eaten the profit margin themselves.

They are trying to establish the new architecture. Also you still need to shell out $2-3k to get something decent and practically start at $1.5k. I wouldn't call that cheap or even cheaper. What is the past difference you see?

> still need to shell out $2-3k to get something decent and practically start at $1.5k

They're all using the exact same CPU, in fact you can make the air perform (almost) just as well as the pro/mini by opening it up and adding a thermal pad: https://www.cultofmac.com/759693/thermal-mod-m1-macbook-air/

Current MacBook Pro 14"/16" use the M1 Pro/M1 Max instead of the M1 that the Air and 13" MacBook Pro have, so definitely a different (and later iteration) CPU: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

It's the same CPU with a different core distribution.

No, that's incorrect. Here's an image that illustrates the physical differences between the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max, including their vastly different die sizes: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17019/Die-Sizes.jpg

Let's call it an oversimplification, the SoCs are definitely different. OP sounded like they were thinking about MacBook Air and the 13" MacBook Pro, and not taking the newer models into account.

Starting price for the air is $999, which gets you a very fast computer (albeit one a bit anemic in memory). A couple of years ago, the starting price for the air was still $999, but you got a... much less fast computer.

I bought the 16GB air for 1000 and it's easily the best laptop I've ever owned. Fantastic value

Picked up a refurb 16GB air just last week. I'm astounded at the battery life. It's my dream laptop. I wanted to buy a framework for the repairability, but I make some iOS apps and also really wanted the battery life. I've been floored by how long it lasts, even running npm installs and compiling Angular applications, things that used to burn my lap and drain the battery in 4-6 hours on my Intel air.

The macbooks are starting to become somewhat more repairable. The latest one has pull strip adhesive for the batteries which makes user replacement massively easier.

> you still need to shell out $2-3k to get something decent

Honestly 16GB Air is pretty epic for $1200, though you probably want to spend the extra $200 for a storage bump as well. I'm very happy with the performance for dev tasks, and with my (displaylink) dock it runs multiple screens just fine too.

There was a few months back. Now they seem to have more reasonable timetables.

Custom build Mac Studio, on the other hand, takes 10-12 weeks.

> The high value products get priority

So GPUs are not high priority? Because they are out of stock pretty much everywhere too.

It's been pretty easy to buy a 3090 for a while now, and the rest of the 30 series is finally starting to stabilize thankfully

At MSRP? If so, where?

Probably not consumer grade GPUs. NVIDIAs enterprise GPUs are basically the same silicone sold at 10x the price, and bought in batches of 10s to thousands at a time.

I know which SKUs I would be prioritising.

> Notice how there is no shortage of chips for iPhones, because Apple just buys the capacity at whatever cost it takes.

Apple bought out the entire capacity of TSMC's 3nm node [1]. I would not be surprised if the deal actually was for Apple to fund the construction of the fab in exchange for this level of priority.

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Bericht-Apple-schnappt-sich-komple...

>Won't the new products also simply not be available?

There are shortage in low end, high NM, mature node. This is on 4nm leading node.

Chip production is not completely fungible.

What? They are sold out, not "can't be purchased".

What's the difference? If they are perpetually sold out, then they cannot be purchased.

There is constant production and deliveries being made, just no standing inventory.

Can you enter a queue to purchase them? If not it's just a cat and mouse game to get one.

As a consumer you may not be able to, but volume customers and distributors are ordering them and waiting for them.

Direct retail / individual sales are always the least important and the first to get restricted amounts of supply so that large orders can be filled. There is a queue and lots of orders are moving through it, you personally just don't see this.

Depending on the product, volume orders for high-end ICs are typically running between 52 and 72 weeks of lead time at the present, and it's been this way for many months now. So the orders that are getting filled today for parts were placed in early 2021 in most cases.

This is generally very difficult for retailers, because they have had to come up with capital to have a year's worth of orders in the pipeline. So they've been having to stock fewer things -- only what they are absolutely sure will sell -- and can't use real-time sales data to estimate the next month's order.

Welcome to the new normal, it'll be this way for at least another year or two, minimum (until new factories get built plus pre-pandemic levels of productivity, for the most part).

i guess you dont' know the world of shoes and hypebeast. The primary "value" of the industry is scarcity alone. The sneaker market side of it is worth $100bil alone.

Nvidia is fabless. THey dont make anything. They are primary R&D. This is the fruit.

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