“The company routinely takes apart popular consumer-electronic devices in order to determine the identities of key suppliers and also to estimate the costs of components. Last year a preliminary iSuppli analysis pegged the cost of the previous iPhone, the 3G, at $174.33. These estimates help financial analysts make better-educated guesses about the profit margins manufacturers make on each unit sold, though there are many costs that a teardown doesn’t address, such as software, research and development, and patent licensing costs,” Hesseldahl reports.
“Often the cost to assemble a new generation of a product is lower than it was for the previous generation. However, the 16-gigabyte iPhone 3GS actually costs slightly more to build than last year’s iPhone 3G—$178.96, a difference of $4.63. However, that is much lower than estimates for the first-generation iPhone, which pegged the cost at $220,” Hesseldahl reports.
“Some components of the new iPhone are cheaper, even though they’ve gotten better. Take the multitouch display. While Apple has improved on the screen by adding an oleophobic coating that doesn’t attract fingerprints and cleans more easily, the cost of the screen and related components have over the past year come down by $1, Andrew Rassweiler, iSuppli’s teardown manager, says, to $16,” Hesseldahl reports.
Full article, with info about iPhone 3G S component suppliers, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
