Intel wants to win Apple back as a chip customer

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• Apple will be giving up Intel chips in 2020
• Intel continues to hope to win back Apple
• Will price negotiations between Apple and TSMC bring Intel back into play?

It was certainly bad news for Intel when the Apple iGroup officially announced the end of its long-standing partnership with Intel in June 2020. It started in 2005 and has had some ups and downs over the years. At the end of the relationship, however, the chipmaker was not entirely innocent. The tech group is said to have refused to produce chips for iPhones, which ultimately gave the iGroup the idea of ​​not only producing its own chips for its smartphones, but in general. As Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger admitted in an interview with “Axios” in February 2021, Apple has also done this very well: “Apple decided that they could make a better chip than us. And, you know, they have a really good one job done.” Even then, the boss was hopeful that one day he would be able to win Apple back as a customer if he could “create a better chip than they could do themselves.”

Intel isn’t giving up hope of winning Apple back in 2022 either

Apple’s silicon chip has enjoyed great success since its introduction and is now installed in almost every Mac product, with only the Mac Pro still containing an Intel Xeon processor. However, it is not unlikely that this chip will one day be replaced by Apple’s own processor. And yet Intel still hasn’t given up hope that one day it will be able to count the iGroup among its customers again. This was recently made clear by Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Executive Vice President of Intel’s Client Computing Group, as part of the Intel Innovation Event, as reported by AppleInsider with reference to Ian Cutress. Holthaus said that Intel “will never give up when it comes to winning Apple back as a customer.”

So: Will never stop trying to get Apple to be a customer again. Intel wants everyone to have high performance.

– ??. ??? ??????? (@IanCutress) September 27, 2022

Apple at odds with TSMC over price increase

It is certainly unlikely that Apple will switch from its own silicon chips back to Intel processors in the foreseeable future, but the semiconductor manufacturer could try to get the iGroup into contact as a contract manufacturer. Because it currently relies in particular on the Taiwanese top dog TSMC. However, Apple is apparently in difficult price negotiations with this, as Extreme Tech reports with reference to the Taiwanese news portal Economic Daily News. The chip giant wants to push through a price increase of six to nine percent for semiconductors in order to pass on rising costs due to inflation and higher energy prices to customers. However, the prices of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company are already around 20 percent higher than those of its competitors, which is due to the group’s technical superiority.

Apple made this argument in view of the price increase and apparently refused to pay it. Now, however, the two companies have entered into a kind of symbiosis with each other. As TSMC’s 2021 annual report reveals, a single customer would have accounted for 26 percent of the chipmaker’s revenue, or nearly $14.8 billion. Even if the iGroup is not mentioned by name here, it can be assumed that it is Apple. On the other hand, the search for an alternative semiconductor manufacturer would be difficult for Apple – or would Intel’s hour come in this case?

Intel has an advantage as a US company thanks to the Chips Act

Another factor should speak in favor of the US group, precisely because it is a US company and the nation wants to make itself more independent of foreign semiconductor manufacturers with the Chips Act passed in July. Although TSMC also wants to set up a factory in Arizona in the future, the tech giant’s most important location remains Taiwan, where political conflicts with the People’s Republic of China only recently flared up again.

As TechSpot writes with reference to UDN, Apple has now shown its understanding of TSMC’s price increase, but the dispute shows that this cooperation also ultimately has shaky feet. So Intel can continue to hope that Apple will return as a customer one day.

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