A few weeks ago there was news about the Huawei Mate 60 Pro being some sort middle finger to US chip sanctions as it features a 7nm chip made solely in the People's Republic of China.

Skepticism over the chip's performance or fear mongering of Chinese surveillence or innovation-theft aside, I think it's great that SMIC continues to compete because they've had a dismal decade as TSMC across the strait continues to dominate, but my opinion is that this whole deal is a complete nothingburger.

This is one model from one phone company announcing a phone that can hardly hold up to what the market introduced 3 years ago. If SMIC really became capable to produce 7nm chips at competitive yields, then where are the phones across the price spectrum? Where are the CPUs (desktop, server), where are the GPUs (autonomous cars, AI)? The announcement does nothing, it's nothing but a jerk off for Chinese state media! Where are the indications that these chips can support production numbers that go beyond stocking a few flagship stores for a publicity stunt?

Skimming through Chinese media there's calls for this being some masterful play that will one day force Apple and other players to use these Chinese chips to serve their domestic market. As if this announcement will cause multinationals to rethink their strategy. It's nonsense propaganda! That's not how the business works at all. If the innovation is real, they should be pumping out so many chips they'd be giving them out to all sorts of applications

SMIC has done nothing but burn money and struggle, sanctions or not, seems all they can muster is one phone 😮‍💨

Tldr;

If anyone is in the market for a new phone that's not an iPhone, ignore Huawei, try the Zenfone 10 🇹🇼🙂