Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Mac chips almost wipe out chipmaker TSMC

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All Apple, all the time.

Apple A16 chip
(Image credit: Apple)

The upcoming iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are both expected to use new A17 chips based on TSMC's 3nm manufacturing process. The same can be said of the M3 Mac chips likely to power the next generation of MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and more.

Now, it appears that Apple has already set the wheels in motion to make sure that it has enough of those chips to go around, reportedly taking a huge chunk of TSMC's 3nm manufacturing capacity and making it its own.

While there will still be scope for TSMC to build chips for other companies, it's said that Apple will account for almost 90% of the entire manufacturing capacity that TSMC has to offer. The move means that TSMC can now bank on a bumper second half of the year.

All the chips

A DigiTimes report seen by MacRumors claims that Apple is by far the biggest customer that TSMC will be working with for its 3nm chips.

"TSMC will see the baseline 3nm process technology (N3B) dominate 90% of its N3 family capacity in 2023, and nearly 90% of the N3B capacity reportedly has been booked by Apple for new iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads for the year," the report claims.

The new chips are expected to offer performance and power efficiency improvements over the chips that are currently used by Apple's devices.

Apple is expected to refresh its iPhone lineup this September, but only the best iPhones will get the new chips. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus are instead expected to use the A16 Bionic chips that currently power the iPhone 14 Pro models.

As for the M3-powered Macs, they could begin to debut later this year according to reports including those from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.