Supply chains and fashion in tech (Spam Mail #34)

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💎 Word gems

🎧 Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5 (Decoder via The Verge / Nilay Patel)

This podcast episode features Harvard professor, Willy Shih, where he gives a thorough dissection into the complicated supply chain behind chip manufacturing, and what really is causing the global chip shortage. It’s a whole other side of consumer tech we never really hear about.

There is the leading edge, as you described. And that is mostly chips that go into smartphones, computers, data-center stuff, and high-performance chips. A large part of the world uses older process technologies. Sometimes they’re five or six generations older than what you find in your Apple iPhone. And so those chips are much cheaper to make because the technology is less demanding and the equipment is already fully depreciated. It’s already paid for. So those are much more commodity chips.

The Devil Wears Allbirds: Silicon Valley companies are sucking up all the fashion editors (The Cut / Emilia Petrarca)

Tech seems to be figuring out the fashion world. In hardware aesthetics are leading over specs. And in software, an increasing integration of shopping and fashion behaviors into every app.

Just a few weeks ago, my LIKE button on Instagram curiously switched to a shopping-bag icon, and it’s not a coincidence that more fashion editors are being hired by tech platforms at the same time they are competing to expand their e-commerce capabilities. This summer, Pinterest rolled out a feature that allows creators to tag products and earn commissions through affiliate links — a function that already existed on TikTok and Instagram.

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