PlayStation 4s may soon start getting a little harder to find, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a report on Friday. There’s one crucial component that you can find in the system, which is also found within almost every other electronic device you likely find yourself using regularly, from your smartphone to your TV. It’s called a multilayer ceramic chip capacitor, or MLCC, and it’s about the size of a grain of rice. It’s responsible for storing power and controlling the energy flow in each product, but the supply is going down again, and fast.
While the part only costs less than a penny to create, there’s only actually created by a few different companies: Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., Taiyo Yuden CO., and Murata Manufacturing Co., which together comprise 60 percent of the MLCC market. The companies are having difficulty supplying enough of the capacitors to keep up with the ridiculous market, and it looks like production is slowing down because of it.
But that’s no reason to despair. This same situation has happened before, and the supply and demand ended up leveling out. There is, however, a reason for concern if we start seeing any more scarcity of these tiny little chips. It’s hard to believe they control so much of our day-to-day lives, and yet they seem so insignificant.
Just in case, you may want to go ahead and grab a PlayStation 4 while you still can, especially if you’re thinking of playing any of the latest games scheduled to come out later this year and early 2019. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Anthem are just a few, and there are tons more beyond those.
What do you think about these new chips? Have you ever heard about them before? Are you in the market for a PlayStation 4? Let us know!