So far, Apple is the only mobile product manufacturer capable of getting its hands on TSMC’s 3nm chips. This is due to the many agreements that the North American giant has been able to close with the production giant, more specifically, due to the many millions of dollars invested in its partner year after year.
However, after 1 year of exclusivity, everything indicates that these much-desired 3nm chips will begin to reach other customers, such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, and even Intel, AMD and NVIDIA.
However, Apple will continue to be the biggest customer of these production lines… In isolation!
3nm for everyone! But Apple will continue to reign
Therefore, as you may know, Apple already has the recently launched iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max equipped with 3nm processors. In addition, the new MacBook Pro notebooks also feature the M3 SoC, also based on the same TSMC 3nm process.
Product lines capable of exhausting the production force that TSMC had available for the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024. But that will start to change, now that the Taiwanese giant is finally finalizing its new, more efficient 3nm lines .
In other words, from now on, we will start to see more manufacturers getting their hands on 3nm, with the first finished products hitting the market sometime in late 2024 or early 2025.
But, the reality is that Apple’s investment in 3nm will only increase in 2024 and 2025.
In fact, Apple’s orders will increase by around 50%, to give life to all the other products in its range that also want to make the leap to the most powerful and efficient processors on earth. We are therefore talking about the entire iPhone 16 range that should hit the market in September, all the new iPads, among other products planned for the coming months.
Apple will continue to be TSMC’s biggest customer throughout the 3nm era, and probably into the next 2nm era as well. After all, there are already several rumors pointing to a repeat of the 2023 agreement.