A recent Wired story enumerated the ways many companies are dealing with the chip shortage. Stockpiling is a common concern as it exacerbates the problems. Paying higher prices is a given, especially if it’s enough to close the loop on a company’s supply chain.

“If you’re building a $350,000 mass spectrometer, and you can’t ship it because you don’t have a 50-cent chip, you’re pretty much willing to pay anything.”

Other options are swapping chips for similar alternatives or even reverting to outdated or obsolete components.

Many companies are rewriting their code so that it works with different chips or so that a single chip does double the work. In some cases, Juran says, companies are using chips that are as much as 10 years old.

…

one large industrial conglomerate had resorted to buying washing machines just to scavenge the chips inside them for its products.

Companies are also just dropping features: “Tesla started selling cars without USB ports.” It’s probably not worth holding up an entire automobile for a USB-C outlet — really this is indicative of the whole mess, how we can suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing.

Read the whole Wired article here.