Next year the desktop market will almost stop falling

Not the easiest year for the computer market is coming to an end, so DigiTimes Research experts have shared their forecasts for next year and summed up the current one.
The latest one for the desktop market, according to the authors of the study, was not as bad as the one for laptops.
The supply of mobile PCs fell by 20%, and desktop PCs fell by only 11%.
Next year, the decline in the desktop market will be limited to 2.1%.Image source: AppleAccording to the source, during the three quarters of this year, the corporate sector supported the demand for desktop systems, and only in the fourth quarter should the volume of their shipments consistently fall by 11.7%.
Most manufacturers have accumulated impressive inventories in their warehouses, so they are in no hurry to deliver new products to customers.For all of 2022, DigiTimes Research predicts that 86.4 million desktops will be delivered globally in finished form.
That's 10.9 percent less than the results for 2019, which is taken as a base for comparison because of the lack of a pandemic factor.
Next year, no more than 84.6 million desktops will be delivered to the market, a decline of 2.1% from this year.In the first quarter of the outgoing year, 21 million desktops were delivered, in the second quarter shipments peaked at 24.3 million units, but in the third has already dropped to 22 million.They are expected to fall to 19.2 million units in the fourth quarter.
Almost 13% of the segment is comprised of all-in-one, one-piece computers.
By the end of the year 11.06 million units should be delivered.
The peak of popularity of such PCs reached in 2021, when 14.32 million units were sold.
For this reason this year the number of monoblocks shipped on the market will decrease by 22%.The largest contract manufacturer of monoblocks previously was Quanta Computer, which serves the interests of Apple, but at the end of the year it dropped to the third place.
Compal and its main client Lenovo is on the second place, and the first this year will go to HP Inc.
Wistron, which produces monoblocks for Dell, will be in fourth place.
The three Taiwanese contract manufacturers together control 72% of the market.
Next year, shipments of desktop monoblocks could grow by several percent, according to DigiTimes Research analysts.
In their view, a return to growth in demand for Apple iMacs should contribute to this.

Apple helped China's YMTC solve problems in flash memory production

Chinese company YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technology Co.) is one of the most competitive Chinese electronics manufacturers.
And in this it has been helped by a somewhat unexpected ally - Apple.
The U.S.
giant has helped the Chinese company to hire Western specialists, who have provided her reduced scrap rate and increased productivity, reports the New York Times citing its own sources.Image source: ymtc.comProduced YMTC 3D NAND memory chips have a unique architecture Xtacking - it involves making a memory chip from two crystals, which are stacked one on top of the other.
The memory module itself is formed on one, and the other is used for peripheral logic.
With through silicon connections (TSV), the 3D NAND chip offers the best of both worlds at once: a dense memory array and a fast interface.
That is, the chips come out with high density and high speed.YMTC's competitors produce memory arrays and logic on the same chip, making it difficult to increase interface speed, and consumer SSDs can't unlock the full potential of PCIe 5.0 x4.
On the other hand, the technology proposed by YMTC is significantly more complex than the solutions used by Kioxia and Western Digital, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.
The Chinese company could not reach a high enough level of quality products (there were a lot of defects), and was stalling with the expansion of production.
It is reported that Apple has helped YMTC with hiring specialists to fix the problems.Apple uses 3D NAND memory in the vast majority of its products - this means that it benefits from the diversification of supply so that manufacturers offer it more favorable prices.
However, with the sanctions imposed by Washington on the Chinese semiconductor industry, Apple has abandoned its intention to use YMTC products even for devices to be sold in China.
Due to the sanctions, the leading manufacturers of silicon wafers have now also stopped cooperating with the company.

Qualcomm: smartphone sales will fall more than 10% this year, and Apple will not give up its modems in 2023

In the third quarter Qualcomm managed to increase revenues by 22% to $11.39 billion, but not the most optimistic forecast for the smartphone market caused the company's stock price to decline by 7.56% after the close of trading.
According to this provider of mobile processors, at the end of the current calendar year, the smartphone market will shrink not by 5-6%, but by 10-12%.
Since the beginning of this quarter, the company will also stop hiring new staff.Image source: Qualcomm TechnologiesIn the current quarter, as stated by representatives of Qualcomm, the company's revenue will be in the range of $9.2 to $10 billion, which is a couple of billion dollars below the most modest expectations of analysts.
Apparently, this also contributed to Qualcomm's share price decline after the release of financial statistics.
The company's representatives also noted that a sharp decline in demand and an improvement in the supply of components led to an increase in product inventories.
Qualcomm will have to spend the accumulated surplus products in the warehouses for about a couple more quarters.
The company has been running QCT, which supplies chips for smartphones and other devices that transmit data over wireless channels, and has generated $9.9 billion in revenue last quarter, up 28 percent from the same period last year.
Smartphone chip shipments brought Qualcomm $6.57 billion in revenue last quarter, increasing revenue by 40% over the same quarter last year.
The automotive business grew 58% to $427 million, while the Internet of Things added 24%, giving Qualcomm a core revenue of $1.92 billion.
Finally, radio frequency components dropped 20% to $992 million.Technology licensing and patents brought Qualcomm $1.44 billion last quarter, up 8% from a year earlier, but this revenue line still fell short of analysts' expectations.
The head of the company, Cristiano Amon, acknowledged that Qualcomm cannot stay away from the negative impact of macroeconomic conditions on the entire semiconductor industry.
Operating costs are expected to be reduced not only by suspending the expansion of the staff from October this year, but also by other measures.
Regarding the relationship with customers, it was said that the license agreement with Samsung Electronics has been extended until 2030, and in the next quarter the Korean giant will increase the share of Qualcomm chips in its mobile devices.
Almost all of the iPhones next year will use Qualcomm modems, though the company previously expressed fears that it will not get more than 20% of Apple's orders because it has time to introduce modem solutions of its own design.
In a couple of years, in the opinion of Qualcomm's management, Apple will still be able to almost completely abandon the components of the first brand.
According to the forecasts of Bloomberg, the first smartphones Apple with modem components of its own design will not appear until 2024.

Apple Mac Pro will get M2 processor version with 48 processing cores and 152 graphics cores

In a traditional news digest, Bloomberg product specialist journalist Mark Gurman shared his views on the company's range of new products, which will be equipped with different versions of M2 processor.
Mac Pro workstations, in his opinion, will get M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme processors that will combine 24 to 48 processing cores and 76 to 152 graphics cores.Image source: ArleThe author believes that processors for the Apple Mac Pro will provide support for up to 256 GB of memory and will be two or four times more productive than the M2 Max.
In fact, according to the source, Apple is already testing one of the Mac Pro configurations with the new processor.
It offers 24 processing cores (16 performance and 8 economy), 76 graphics cores and 192 GB of memory.
The prototype runs macOS Ventura 13.3.
It should be recalled that the Ventura 13.0 version is due to debut this week.MacBook Pro notebooks with 14-inch and 16-inch displays, respectively, will feature the M2 Pro and M2 Max processors.
The latter will feature 8 performance processing cores and 4 economy cores, as well as 38 graphics cores.
Provision is made for the availability of 64 GB of memory.
Similar characteristics will be available in versions of notebooks with both sizes of diagonal display.Mac mini, according to the source, will also be updated, it will get the M2 processor in the configuration already known from the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, offering 8 processing cores and 10 graphics.
The company is also testing a version of the Mac mini with the M2 Pro processor, which will offer increased cores.The new generation Mac Pro, based on the M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme processors, won't go on sale until 2023, according to Mark Gurman, but the updated MacBook Pro and Mac mini could debut either in November, January, or next spring.
At least, that was the announcement frequency for previous generations of Apple products.

Apple will change the charging connector to USB Type-C already in the next-generation iPhone

It is highly probable that the next-generation iPhone will receive a USB Type-C port for charging.
The reason for that will be the law passed in the EU prescribing to equip smartphones, tablets and other electronics sold in the EU exclusively with USB Type-C ports.
Given the size of the market in the region, Apple will have to make concessions and abandon the proprietary Lightning.Image source: Solen Feyissa/unsplash.comThe law was approved by the European Parliament on Tuesday and mandates the transition to unified charging by the end of 2024.According to Ben Wood, senior analyst at CCS Insight, Apple will have to \"inevitably\" capitulate and move to USB Type-C in the iPhone 15.
The expert predicts that since the interface change has already taken place in the case of the MacBook and iPad Pro, the transition process has actually already begun.
Since the iPhone 14 did not bring significant changes in terms of design, more significant updates are likely to follow in the iPhone 15 - this will be the best time to implement the new port.Back in May, Bloomberg reported on the tests of the iPhone with USB Type-C, but sources warned that the novelties will not appear before 2023.
The IDC believes that if Apple switched to USB Type-C for Europe in 2023, the U.S.
tech giant will switch to a new type of charging and the iPhone in other regions - unless the company decides that too much money is made on proprietary chargers and accessories to simply give them up.
Nevertheless, experts believe that Apple is actually already preparing for the transition in the next two years.The European law was developed about 10 years.
European lawmakers argue that the use of different standards for charging contributes to the growth of waste, and the innovations will allow customers not to buy a new charger with each new smartphone.According to Wood, it is a \"victory for common sense\".
While Apple fans have a huge number of devices that charge from the Lightning connector, given the ubiquity of USB Type-C, Apple's use of this standard makes a lot of sense.

Apple's intention to use Chinese YMTC flash memory has angered American authorities

Back in late March Bloomberg reported that Apple is considering the use of Chinese YMTC solid-state memory in its mobile devices, and with the release of the new generation smartphones this topic has found a second life in an unexpected context.
According to the U.S.
parliamentarians, in case of implementation of such cooperation Apple could face sanctions from the U.S.
authorities.Image source: AppleThe two U.S.
senators from the Republican Party, Marco Rubio and Michael McCaul, who oversee the issues related to intelligence and international relations in the U.S.
Parliament, according to the Financial Times, criticized the likely decision of Apple to use 14 memory chips of Chinese YMTC brand in the manufacture of the iPhone.
If such steps are taken by the manufacturer, Marco Rubio promised to subject Apple to inspections unprecedented by the standards of the U.S.
federal government.
In his opinion, they can not allow the presence of products controlled by the PRC authorities in millions of devices used by the Americans in national telecommunications networks.Apple responded to such requests only by denying the fact of using YMTC memory in any products, but acknowledged that it had tried to explore the possibility of its use in the assembly of individual iPhone models, designed for implementation in the domestic market of China.
Outside of the country such devices should not appear in any case.
In addition, all data stored in the memory of Apple mobile devices are fully protected by encryption.In April this year it became known that the U.S.
authorities became interested in YMTC in the context of the supply of its memory chips to the sanctioned Huawei Technologies.
According to the senators, the inevitable exchange of experience between Apple and YMTC in the case of cooperation will allow the latter to strengthen China's position in the technological sphere.
In July this year, U.S.
parliamentarians have already proposed an initiative to add YMTC to the \"black list\" of Chinese companies with which it is forbidden for all manufacturers that use technology of American origin.
The U.S.
authorities are concerned about the alleged active subsidization of YMTC by the Chinese authorities, which as a result allows the company to sell the memory at a price below cost and violate the rules of fair competition in the global market.
YMTC company is a leader in solid-state memory manufacturing in China not only in volume of products, but also in technological area.
At least, it has recently mastered the production of 192-layer 3D NAND chips, albeit so far in the status of engineering samples, but on a global scale, this allows us to talk about the approach of this Chinese manufacturer, founded in 2016, to the industry leaders in the level of technical competence.

The next MacBook Pro will get new M2 chips made with the old 5nm processor

Although the predictions of famous analyst Ming-Chi Kuo are not always accurate, his opinion is listened to.
Ming-Chi Kuo says the MacBook Pro will use Apple's M2 processors but will be built with a 5nm processor, though previous rumors suggested a 3nm chip.Image source: AppleThe new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models are expected to ship in Q4 2022.
At the same time, according to TSMC's plan, 3nm chips for Apple \"will not start generating revenue\" until Q1 2023.
It turns out that the processors for the MacBook Pro will use the same process technology as the chips of the current generation, that is 5 nm.Image source: Min-Chi KuoAccording to the dynamics of previous releases, the rumors may well be true.
Especially since Kuo already has some credibility in the industry.
Earlier, the analyst made a prediction that the Apple iPhone 14 will rise in price relative to the smartphones of the previous series by an average of 15%.

Vulnerability found in Apple M1 processors that cannot be closed by software

Scientists at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have reported the creation of a PACMAN cyberattack technique based on a hardware vulnerability in Apple M1 processors.
The authors of the study specified that their solution could also be relevant for other chips on the Arm-architecture, but it has not yet been confirmed in practice.Image source: apple.comAttack is performed using a combination of hardware and software and can be performed remotely, without physical access to the victim's computer.
In theory, PACMAN gives the attacker access to the OS kernel, which essentially means full control over the machine.
The most annoying thing is that this hardware vulnerability cannot be fixed by any software, which means that it can remain relevant not only for existing, but also for future products.
Theoretically, Arm-chips from other manufacturers, including Qualcomm and Samsung, could also be vulnerable if they use pointer authentication.
The attack is based on the Pointer Authentication security feature, which is used to verify executable software via cryptographic signatures or Pointer Authentication Codes (PACs).
This helps protect the system from attacks involving pointer spoofing of memory addresses, which are controlled by PAC values.
The PACMAN technique allows PAC values to be \"tampered with,\" working in a similar way to the Spectre and Meltdown exploits.
Researchers emphasize that PACMAN works at various privilege levels all the way up to gaining access to the OS kernel.The researchers reported their discovery to Apple months ago.
The vulnerability has not yet been registered in the public CVE database, but the authors of the project promised to do so in the near future.
Scientists will provide all the details in their report at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2022), which will open on June 18 in New York.