At first, it had been the COVID-19 pandemic that threw plans and schedules into chaos. Now the tech industry is facing one more crisis, which would affect anything with an integrated chip, which is nearly all electronics lately. Although smartphone companies are less forthcoming about it, insider sources reveal some reshuffling of schedules and products behind the scenes. one among those is OnePlus, which already canned some North American OnePlus 9 configurations due to the chip supply shortage and might even be canceling the OnePlus 9T for an equivalent reason.
According to different sources, including Intel, the silicon problem could worsen before it gets better. Almost everyone down the road is affected, and a few smartphone manufacturers might already feel the warmth. Unlike its peers, OnePlus admitted that constraints forced it to cancel the OnePlus 9 base model for the US and Canada, focusing instead on the 12GB RAM, 256GB storage configuration.
Now it seems that another OnePlus product is going to be affected more drastically. Few people already expect that there’ll be a OnePlus 9T Pro this year, considering there wasn’t a OnePlus 8T Pro last year. Now tipster Max Jambor claims that there won’t even be a OnePlus 9T this year in the least.
No 9T
— Max Jambor (@MaxJmb) July 27, 2021
He doesn’t give any details about the cancellation, but it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to presume it’s associated with equivalent supply constraints. That said, there’s also speculation that it might be associated with OnePlus’ closer ties with OPPO, considering how many of its phones bear some similarities to the latter’s products.
The hiatus could even be an honest time for OnePlus to consolidate its smartphone lines. With two new OnePlus Nord models and two “mainline” phones, the smaller company could be spreading itself too thin. But, which will even be the rationale for its partial merger with OPPO, to share the latter’s resources to require a number of the load far away from itself.
