A deal on grocery delivery from Apple and Instacart, a big win for TSMC, and it’s been an interesting week for Spotify:
- Pay for your grocery delivery via Instacart with Apple Pay, and Apple will pick up the delivery charges through January 10th
- TSMC will reportedly build all of the A12 processors for this year’s iPhones, edging out Samsung on what could be a huge order
- Spotify has announced that it has 70 million paid subscribers, is filing for an IPO to go public, and might have to pay out $1.6 billion in a lawsuit
The text version of the podcast can be read below. To listen to the podcast here, click the play button on the player below. Apple News readers need to visit Apple World Today in order to listen to the podcast.
Text Version
This is Steve Sande for Apple World Today, and you’re listening to the AWT News Update podcast for Thursday, January 4th, 2018.
Have you ever used Instacart? It’s a delivery app that is being used by a large and growing number of major US grocery and pharmacy chains, and now Apple has teamed up with Instacart for free delivery of orders through January 10th. The only gotcha? You need to pay for your Instacart purchase with Apple Pay. An email was sent to Apple Pay users this morning, and your orders must be $35 or more…which isn’t hard when purchasing groceries. Some restrictions apply in addition to the minimum order limit. Some of the larger chains that are using Instacart include Wegmans, Whole Foods Market, Shoppers Food Mart, Giant, Costco Wholesale, Safeway, CVS, Price Rite, and Harris Teeter. Oh, and your cats and dogs aren’t left out of the deal — you can also use Instacart for delivery of food for your favorite pets from Petco. Once the deal is over with, you’ll pay delivery fees depending on the size of the order, the delivery window, and special fees for high demand periods.
It’s a win for TSMC, otherwise known as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The company has apparently locked up all A12 chip orders for 2018 iPhones, the second time that TSMC has edged out Samsung for a major processor order from Apple. TSMC also makes the A11 Bionic processor that is used in the iPhone 8 and X, which uses a 10-nanometer lithography process. The A12 is expected to use a 7-nm process, which means that more performance can be packed into a smaller chip and power efficiency can be enhanced. TSMC has been willing to spend a lot of money to build new factories to use smaller and smaller processes, and the company is expected to start construction on a new facility later this year that will allow 5-nanometer chips to be built in 2019. Construction will begin on a 3-nanometer factory valued at $20 billion that will most likely begin rolling out chips in 2021 or so.
Apple’s toughest competitor in the music streaming business is Spotify, and the company has been quite busy this week. Yesterday, the company announced that it has filed plans to go public, with an IPO expected later this year. Today Spotify announced that it has 70 million subscribers, quite a win compared to Apple Music’s 30 million subscribers. Spotify also has an advertising-supported free tier with limited features and access to streaming music. That free tier is huge, with over 100 million users. Spotify ran a temporary $0.99 subscription deal that gave those users three months of service over the holidays, and that obviously gave Spotify the subscription bump of about 10 million users since last summer. Life isn’t all a bed of roses for Spotify, though. The company is also facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit from the publisher of music from Tom Petty and Neil Young, which might put a damper on its IPO plans.
That’s all for today; I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with another edition of the AWT News Update.
