Fun and games continue...
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/samsun ... 2012-11-11

Well, I read the other day that they're already working with other manufacturers on future chips, possibly the A7 processor - so Samsung's days as an Apple supplier are definitely numbered anyway. I guess they realise this anyway and are just trying to extract the maximum amount of profit out of the contract before it disappears.

I'm sure other manufacturers are watching this debacle and, to be honest, they're doing themselves no favours whatsoever - I mean, what company in their right mind would consider using Samsung as a supplier in the future?

There's only so many people around with the fabrication kit to make state of the art CPUs (and the R&D budget to keep on the edge of that business). Apple etc could make their own eventually, but a fab plant takes years to build because of the special requirements in terms of sealed environments & etc.

A Fab takes several billion to set up and the reduction of the die scale (32 - 28 - 22nm) takes another couple of billion to tool up. That is why Intel are so far ahead at the moment, AMD can't afford to keep up.

For ARM, Samsung are the leaders at the moment, the others are still catching up to their current scale.

That said, Apple have been buying their ARM chips in huge quantities from Samsung. They are now looking to buy less chips and source the rest from elsewhere. If they have found somebody else to provide a portion of their chip and have reduced the number of chips ordered from Samsung for a quarter, they aren't fulfilling the agreed purchase volumes, so their discount will be less.

Without knowing the full story, it is difficult to tell exactly why they raised the prices...

On the other hand, maybe they've had to put up their prices to cover the legal costs of fighting Apple in the courts.

Given the current market in rare earth elements, surely a price rise is always on the books?

not sure there are any rare earth elements in iICs ..

I suspect that it will also accelerate the switch of Apple's buying to other suppliers. So this is their way of recovering the lost sales that will be inevitable.