Apple Ramping Up M1 Production as New 12.9-inch iPad Pro Expected to Reach Five Million Shipments in 2021
Apple is seemingly expecting high demand for its new M1-powered iPad Pro as the company has asked its main chip supplier, TSMC, to ramp up production of the chip for its new iPad, and newer Mac computers, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes.
Earlier this week, Apple unveiled a brand new 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro powered by the M1 Apple silicon chip, the same chip powering the newly announced 24-inch iMac, and previously released Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
The M1 chip first started shipping in November, and amid an ongoing global chip shortage, demand for the chip is even more pronounced thanks to the new iPad Pro. DigiTimes reports that TSMC had a previous goal of 120,000 chip wafers per month for the second half of the year. Thanks to a strong push from Apple, TSMC now has its eyes set on 140,000 to 150,000 monthly chip waters from the second to the fourth quarter of the year.
Even though the new iPad Pro and 24-inch iMac were announced this week, they won't begin shipping until the second half of May. The significant delay between announcement and shipments is likely due to strain put on Apple's suppliers.
Research cited by another DigiTimes report today suggests that the new higher-end 12.9-inch iPad Pro which features a new Liquid Retina XDR Display, will reach 5 million shipments this year. The new iPad Pro and 24-inch iMac will be available for pre-order starting Friday, April 30.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
I expect Final Cut Pro and Xcode will be coming soon.
Anything that allows for a richer, smoother, more refined user experience is far from overkill.