“According to a teardown analysis conducted by market-research firm iSuppli, the Touch isn’t just a stripped-down iPhone, but rather it has some unique design traits of its own. ISuppli pegs Apple’s total cost of components on the 8GB version of the Touch at $147, or about 49% of the $299 retail price on the device. This would follow the pattern of other devices in Apple’s iPod family that generally carry material costs that amount to about half, give or take a few percentage points, of the retail price,” Arik Hesseldahl reports for BusinessWeek.
MacDailyNews Note: iSuppli estimated only the total cost of components and does not factor in R&D, marketing, and other costs associated with Apple’s iPod touch. Those TV and print ads (we’ve seen touch ads on the backs of many major magazines since the devices release) are certainly not free.
Hesseldahl continues, “While it has the same core features as the iPhone (except, of course, those that require a phone), the Touch, unveiled on Sept. 5, likely represents the road map that Apple will follow on future iPods, says iSuppli’s Andrew Rassweiler. “We expect the click-wheel versions of the iPod to wane in favor of touch-screen-based models,” he says. The iPod Classic may turn out to be the last iPod to use a hard drive. Future versions are more likely to run exclusively on flash memory.”
“Given prior history, the iPod Touch will probably stay on the market in its current form for about a year, only to be upgraded sometime in the third quarter of 2008. During that year, Rassweiler expects, Apple will sell about 8.5 million units. In terms of sales popularity, that would put the Touch about midway in Apple’s family. The iPod Nano is the most popular model, expected to sell nearly 28 million units in 2008, while the Classic will sell about 3.5 million units, according to iSuppli forecasts.
Full article here.