Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max might be tough to get your hands on right after launch. According to Culpium, TSMC is currently sitting on close to $1 billion worth of unfinished Apple processors, stuck because the LPDDR5X memory chips needed to complete them haven’t arrived. Apple hasn’t confirmed any of this, so it’s worth treating as an informed industry report rather than a done deal but Culpan’s supply-chain sourcing has generally proven reliable on Apple production details.
The root cause is how the A20 Pro chip is built. It’s Apple’s first processor on TSMC’s 2nm node, and it uses a new packaging method called Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module, which fuses the processor and its DRAM together at the wafer stage rather than adding memory later. If the DRAM isn’t ready when the wafer moves through, the chip can’t be finished full stop. That’s reportedly why Apple shifted the base iPhone 18’s A20 chip back to older, simpler packaging: to keep it out of this exact problem. Only the Pro, Pro Max, and the rumored foldable iPhone are exposed to the shortage, since they alone need the co-packaged memory.
The event itself still looks on schedule for September. What’s shaky is whether Apple will have enough iPhone 18 Pro units ready to avoid the multi-week shipping delays that hit past launches. If you want a Pro or Pro Max this year, don’t wait around after preorders open.
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