Guo Mingyi disagrees with the "Honey deal" report: Apple buys TSMC chips in a finished product.

CTOnews.com August 10 news, Guo Mingyi tweeted on his X (Twitter) account today, regarding the recent "sweetheart deal" report between Apple and TSMC, saying that the media report is not correct.

"Honey deal" means that Apple places a huge order for 3nm chips from TSMC, but requires that the cost of substandard chips should be borne by TSMC itself. Apple only has to pay for good chips, which is said to save billions of dollars a year.

Guo Mingyi disagreed with the report in his latest tweet, and CTOnews.com attached the original text as follows:

Recent media reports that TSMC does not ask Apple to pay the cost of 3nm defective products is different from my understanding.

There are probably two ways for customers to purchase chips from TSMC, namely finished product procurement (finished goods buy) and wafer procurement (wafer buy).

Most of the procurement methods are wafer procurement, because TSMC's good rate is good enough to ignore the cost of defective products.

But Apple is a very special example. Apple has always required TSMC to provide the world's latest advanced process production services, because the latest advanced process has more defective products at the initial stage of production, so Apple has always been the procurement of finished products.

TSMC will also apportion most of the cost of defective products to the price of each finished product, which is best demonstrated by the significant increase in the cost of new processors used in the new iPhone every year, and this year's A17 is no exception.

Related readings:

"it can save billions of dollars: it is reported that Apple placed a huge order for 3nm chips, requiring TSMC to bear the cost of unqualified chips."