Many people have wondered why Apple does not give up on Samsung in terms of producing components for iDevices, it seems that members of the company's management team have wondered exactly the same thing, and Apple take the first steps to break the collaboration with Samsung. I already told you that TSMC was contracted by Apple in order to produce some chips of the future iDevices, the Taiwanese company gave up some clients to reallocate its resources to Apple and this collaboration will be extremely important in the future. TSMC will produce dual/quad-core processors for Apple using a 20nm manufacturing process, which Samsung is now unable to offer the American company.
"Apple is working with TSMC at 20 nanometers," said Gus Richard, a chip analyst at Piper Jaffray, referring to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's most advanced 20-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process. The Apple-Samsung relationship has deteriorated to such a poor point that they're just looking to fill contractual obligations, then make a change. They'll ramp down Samsung and ramp up TSMC. And some products will get some of one and some of the other.
Practically, the collaboration relations between Samsung and Apple have reached the point where the companies only want to respect their contractual obligations, to complete those contracts and to stop the collaboration, at least on the processor production side. Until then, the iDevices will have a part of components produced by Samsung, another part produced by TSMC and many problems will arise here, because the components produced by two different companies will of course have noticeable differences. It is not known yet whether this will affect iDevices, but starting with iPad 4 or iPhone 5S/6 we should find out.
Giving up the collaboration with Samsung was logical, it was supposed to come many months ago, but it seems that by 2013/2014 we will have processors produced by Koreans. Although Apple renounces Samsung for the development of processors, for now nothing is known regarding the collaboration for the production of the other components of the iDevices, Samsung manufacturing approximately one third of everything that is assembled in an iPhone.
