Apple

Apple may be affected by a serious problem with its SSD supplier


Apple has always tried, as far as possible, to have several different suppliers for the same component, to diversify production and not depend on a single manufacturer. But sometimes it is impossible. They are very high-tech products, and their high level of specialization means that only one manufacturer meet your demands.

That happens with Kioxia, the old Japanese Toshiba. It manufactures the NAND memory for most Apple devices. Well now it turns out that this supplier has had a very serious contamination problem in its two plants in Japan. And that may have a rebound effect on the production of almost the entire range of Apple products…

Kioxia (formerly known as Toshiba) is associated with WesternDigital. The two form the world’s largest manufacturer of SSD memories with NAND technology. 30% of all NAND memories manufactured in the world come out of its factories. And it is Apple’s main supplier of such memory chips. They are mounted on most of the company’s devices: on iPhones, iPads or MacBooks, among others.

Well, The Verge has just published a report explaining that Kioxia has had a serious contamination problem in its two NAND memory production plants that it has in Japan. Materials used in the manufacturing process have been contaminated and lost 6.5 billion gigabytes that were already manufactured and that have been defective.

The cause of said problem has not transpired, but it is known that it has affected the production of all that amount of memory chips. It is still early to know how the magnitude of the disaster will affect Apple. It is not known if this has affected already manufactured devices, which will have to be withdrawn from the market, or not.

Production of Apple devices affected

But what is clear is that the shipments planned by Kioxia for these dates of SSD memories, have been canceled until they can be manufactured again with full guarantees. We will see if Apple can divert these orders to other suppliers, so that it does not affect too much in the assembly of its devices.

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