Heavyweight chipmakers Broadcom (AVGO), Intel (INTC) and Texas Instruments (TXN) again dominated as chip suppliers for the Apple (AAPL) Retina MacBook 2016, according to an iFixit teardown, which notes the MacBook finally joined its iPhone and iPad cousins in rose gold solidarity.
The 12-inch MacBook comes equipped with "a faster processor and zippier flash memory." Intel again supplied the core processor and an HD graphics card, and both flash-memory NAND chips (256 gigabytes) came from Toshiba.
Samsung and Micron Technology (MU) split the difference in other memory vectors. Two Samsung chips provide a total 8 GB of RAM, and Micron supplied a single 4-gigabit DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) chip.
Broadcom re-won its touchscreen controller and what iFixit believes to be a wireless chipset, and STMicroelectronics (STM) again supplied a microcontroller.
Texas Instruments supplied a total of four chips, including a system management controller. The Dallas-based chipmaker showed up six times in the earlier iteration, but the 2016 teardown wasn't as extensive as the 2015 teardown, iFixit said.
Fellow Apple supplier NXP Semiconductors (NXPI) was seemingly ousted from the Retina MacBook 2016 logic board. In the 2015 model, the teardown showed NXP supplied a microcontroller and two interface expanders.
Like its 2015 counterpart, the Retina MacBook 2016 earned a 1 out of a possible 10 in repairability from iFixit. The main reason is because the display is a single, fused unit, so "if the display needs replacing, it'll cost a pretty penny."
In afternoon trading on the stock market today, shares of both NXP and STMicroelectronics were down 2%, while Intel stock was down nearly 1% and Micron down more than 1%. Broadcom stock was lower by a fraction, and Texas Instruments stock was up a fraction.
