iSuppli Breaks Down the iPhone 3G S cost … $172.46

Posted on 24 June 2009, at 2:38 pm, by Michael Anderson

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The iPhone hasn’t been out even a week yet, and already iSuppli has detailed the cost of putting it all together. According to an article at EETimes.com, the total cost of components is $172.46, not including manufacturing costs.

According to the article:

“The entry-level, 16Gbyte version of Apple Inc.’s new iPhone 3G S carries a BOM cost of $172.46 and a manufacturing expense of $6.50, for a total of $178.96,” said Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst, teardown services, for iSuppli. “This is slightly higher than iSuppli’s estimate of $174.33 for the original 8Gbyte iPhone 3G based on pricing in July 2008. Although the retail price of the 16Gbyte iPhone 3G S is $199, the same as for the 8Gbyte version of the original iPhone 3G, the actual price of the phone paid by the service provider is considerably higher, reflecting the common wireless industry practice of subsidizing the upfront cost of a mobile phone and then making a profit on subscriptions.”

The biggest components in terms of cost are the memory and display modules, unsurprisingly. The report notes that while it appeared in disassemblies that new vendors for memory chips had been chosen, it is more likely that Apple is aggressively multi-sourcing components based on price and availability.

Here is a list of components:
table1_062409