Oliver Haslam on August 6, 2018, 7:42 pm

2018 iPhone Launch Might Be Delayed Due To A Virus, Here’s What You Need To Know

There’s potential bad news for Apple’s upcoming iPhones, expected to launch in late-September, thanks to a virus which infected one of the company’s major component partners.

TSMC is Apple’s exclusive SoC partner, which means that it is responsible for making all of the CPUs that beat at the heart of the 2018 iPhone and iPad lineup, and as a result, any issues that can impact the production of those chips could have a knock-on affect to the United States’ first $1 trillion company.

As reported by Bloomberg, TSMC was impacted by a virus this past Friday, with production halted for a time, especially on TSMC’s major 12-inch fabs. Those are the ones that are said to be used for Apple’s new A12 CPU, the first on a 7nm architecture, and the powerhouse that will make this year’s new iPhones the most powerful iPhones ever.

However, as reports suggest that fabrication of the wafers used for creating chips was impacted, causing damage to several thousand wafers, the potential is there for Apple to have a chip shortage to deal with ahead of its big September announcement and subsequent release schedule.

It’s not yet clear exactly what happened in order for TSMC and Apple to find themselves in this position, but the former says that there was a “misoperation” during the installation of a new tool in its factory. As soon as this was connected to the company’s network the virus was able to spread throughout it, causing untold problems.

(Image: 2018 iPhone X Plus and 6.1-inch iPhone dummy units)

DigiTimes has reported that Fab 15 TSMC is increasing production of the 7nm chip in order to try and fulfill orders placed by Apple. Whether that’s enough to get phones out of the door over at Foxconn remains to be seen.

(Source: Bloomberg, DigiTimes)