[avian]

M1 is insignificant, or at most just a very small piece of the puzzle. There are currently huge shortages of parts that are made on 10 year old silicon processes. Those share almost nothing in terms of supply chain or manufacturing capabilities with state-of-the-art CPUs like M1 or what Intel makes. Except maybe at the very lowest levels, like wafer and reagent suppliers.

My reading of this whole thing is that we just made a brittle system that fell apart at the first slightly larger global disturbance (the pandemic).

[diogenescynic]

It's lean manufacturing and just-in-time inventory. When you cancel orders or people can't work for days/weeks/months due to a pandemic, it creates a massive backlog. We've created incredibly fragile supply chain.

[bsder]

Ayup. "Always Late(tm) Inventory" in action.

Everybody drained down their inventory heading into Covid assuming demand was going to crash. Simply replenishing that was going to take time even under the best of circumstances.

And, to be fair, there likely has been a bit of uptick in semiconductor demand--lots of people needed webcams, new monitors, new mice, new graphics cards, etc.

Also, fabs are normally running pretty close to capacity in general. An idle fab is a waste of money. This leads to the famous "feast or famine" in the semiconductor industry--either your fab is running full out and people are scrambling to build more, or you have oversupply and your fabs are completely idle. There is basically no middle ground.

I suspect there is also some overbuying going on that is going to unwind on December 31 when a whole bunch of CFOs realize that there is a big tax bill for a bunch of overbought inventory.

It's lots of things all coming together, but, at the end of the day, it's simply the fact that nobody holds inventory, and nobody will get fired for not holding it.