Apple Inc will receive newly developed 10-inch touch screens from Taiwan during the third quarter, Reuters reported yesterday, citing an unidentified person close to Taichung-based display maker Wintek Corp (勝華科技).
Apple does not comment on market rumors or speculation, Jill Tan, a spokeswoman for the maker of the iMac computers in Hong Kong, said by telephone yesterday. Jay Huang, a spokesman at Wintek, did not return calls seeking comment.
The article mirrors reports from Dow Jones Newswires and the Chinese-language Commercial Times, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter, that Apple may introduce a touch-screen netbook in the second half.
Apple does not offer netbooks, a booming category of laptops that perform basic functions and typically sell for less than US$500 each.
The company is working on the laptops with Taiwan’s Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦) and Wintek, Dow Jones reported yesterday, citing two people close to the situation. Carol Hsu, a spokeswoman at Taoyuan-based Quanta, and Huang at Wintek declined to comment on the report yesterday.
Sales of netbooks will almost double this year, even as the total PC market shrinks 12 percent, research firm Gartner Inc said this month. The machines shot to popularity last year with sales of 11.7 million units, and shipments will hit 21 million this year, Gartner said.
Analysts including Brian Marshall at Broadpoint AmTech in San Francisco have said Apple may introduce a netbook.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has sought to quash that rumor, saying in October that Apple did not know how to make a US$500 computer that was not junk.
Quanta is the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of notebook computers. Wintek is the world’s second-largest maker of flat panels for mobile phones.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
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EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
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