Sam Oliver
HTC has switched orders for key components in its smartphones away from Samsung, in a move that echoes Apple's efforts to reduce reliance on a major competitor.
HTC has placed orders for CMOS image sensors with OmniVision and Sony, while part of its supply of AMOLED panels now comes from AU Optronics, DigiTimes reported on Tuesday. Those parts were said to have previously been supplied by Samsung.
Both Apple and HTC have apparently shown interest in moving away from Samsung, as Samsung is one of the world's largest smartphone builders in addition to a key supplier of important electronics components.
HTC is said to be concerned about yield rates and production volume of AMOLED displays from AU Optronics. As a result, HTC still purchases a portion of its displays from Samsung to ensure it will be able to stay at production capacity.
Last month, it was said that Samsung was dropped as a NAND flash memory supplier for Apple's first batch of iPhone 5 units. Evidence to support that was found by iFixit, which discovered in its iPhone 5 teardown that the system-on-a-chip in their unit featured memory from Elpida.
Apple remains one of Samsung's largest and most important customers, and the South Korean electronics maker indicated in August that it intends to apply a "strict internal firewall" to protect its parts deals with Apple. Samsung's handset business and components operations are run separately in hopes of quieting concerns that conflicts of interest could arise.
Samsung continues to build the custom processors that power Apple's devices at its chip plant in Austin, Tex. That includes the new A6 chip that powers the iPhone 5.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
54 Comments
And so it begins...
Maybe Samsung decided that HTC's dwindling orders were not worth their time any more and HTC found that they could get a better deal elsewhere for the amount that they are ordering.
And so it begins...
Good riddance to both Samsung and HTC.
Samsung is as low as it can get at the food chain, they are the "peasants" of the tech industry, however they try to use that (and fandroids too) to create and image of power. For example, since they manufacture pretty much everything, fandroids and stupid people in general seem them as true builders and responsible for idevices, computers, tvs, etc.. And so they think that samsung saves the best for themselves.
The industry is teaching them a lesson, even if there is enough stupid people to buy their gadgets and make them billions of dollars.
Pedromartins
Read your post back to yourself, I am an Apple fan but your post is just ridiculous!
@pedromartins : I'd love to be a peasant earning mere billions of dollars. I'd love to have so little power that I'm "manufacturing pretty much everything".