Acer warns that chip shortage will impact laptop production until 2022

In a nutshell: Acer has tempered the excitement around Computex announcements by reminding people of the global chip shortage. The Taiwanese giant says the situation will continue to impact its laptop production until at least the first or second quarter of 2022.

Acer recently showed off its new products at the company’s annual Next@acer press conference, including the new Predator gaming laptops with RTX 30-series GPUs and mini LED displays. But as with graphics cards, new consoles, etc., availability could be an issue.

In an interview with The Guardian Australia, Acer’s co-chief operating officer Tiffany Huang confirmed the company was feeling the effects of chip shortage and that it “can only fill 50% of the worldwide demand.”

“It will continue to be slow until the first quarter or second quarter of next year,” she said. “We have a severe shortage, and it’s not simply just to make sure every family has a device to use, every person has to have a device for working or education.”

Huang revealed that the shortages had forced Acer to focus more on its education portfolio and less on its gaming products. Similarly, AMD recently revealed that the chip issues meant pouring more resources into producing high-end consumer/gaming CPUs while giving less priority to its budget processors.

As we know, the pandemic saw unprecedented demand for electronic consumer goods and hardware as people worked/learned remotely and opted for home-based entertainment. Covid-19 also disrupted supply lines and production, exacerbating the problem.

“We shipped millions of education devices last year [and] this year,” Huang continued. “That is simply because we believe people really deserve a right to be able to continue their living and learning.”

With Nvidia having just revealed its RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti, and AMD announcing its new desktop APUs and Radeon 6000M mobile processors, there are plenty of enticing products around the corner. There’s little point, however, in getting excited about a new piece of tech that will be impossible to find and cost double or more the MSRP.