State Of Chip Shortage: Blame Bitcoin For The Long Wait For Your New Car And Sony PlayStation 5?
Semiconductors. Chips. You craved for all sorts of smartness with gadgets. You got all sorts of smartness with gadgets. From your toothbrush to your new car. What makes all this work? Chips. They are the backbone of pretty much everything around you. Be it your laptop or PC, your TV, your smartphone or even the good old Wi-Fi router you have at home, everything uses these to work. As does your car, and the newer the car, the more chips it is likely to integrate. You may have noticed over the past few months that the laptop you may have been eyeing is mostly showing as out of stock. And the car that you’ve booked, you’ve been quoted a waiting period that’s around 6 months, if not more. The common thread—the chips that make these smart, are in short supply. Serious chip anxiety, globally, across industries.
There has been a semiconductor shortage for a while now, something we have written about earlier as well. That was a few months ago. The thing is the semiconductor shortage continues to be as severe as before. Supply chains are stuck, production lines have slowed down and while new products and cars may be getting launched, there isn’t enough stock for everyone to buy right away. For us consumers, the ground reality of all the complexity of reasons is two pronged, maybe three. You’ll either simply not be able to buy what you need to because it is not in stock, or you may have to wait much longer to get your hands on your order. Even so, there could be a chance that you’ll be paying a higher price than what you bargained for, as input costs for companies and manufacturers have gone up, and some of that will be passed on to customers. “While the chipset shortage is impacting several sectors including PCs, we are constantly working on ways to ensure smooth supply of products and devices to our end users,” Vickram Bedi, Senior Director, Personal Systems at HP India, had told News18 last month, when asked about how the chip shortage is impacting the laptop production lines. Multiple reasons for this shortage, including the COVID pandemic, semiconductor manufacturing expansion not happening at pace enough to meet existing demand and Bitcoin.
