Apple Iphone costs $265 to build

MARKET RESEARCH firm Isuppli has, like Semiconductor Insights before it, taken an 8GB Iphone to pieces and said the total bill of materials (BOM) and manufacturing cost is $265.83, delivering a margin of 55 per cent.

The thing sells at $1 less than $600 but the Isuppli calculation of Apple's BOM doesn't include royalties and logistics.

The parts include Infineon's digital baseband, RF transceiver, and power management components, said Isuppli. Nat Semi doesn't get a big share of the real estate, with one serial display interface costing $1.50.

But German firm Balda in conjunction with Chinese firm TPK Holding supplied the display module at a cost of $27. The touch screen uses components from Epson, Sharp, and Toshiba Matsushita Display, amounting to $24.50.

Samsung gets the lion share of component manufacturers by supplying an ARM RISC core, NAND flash and DRAM, amounting to a whopping cost of $76.25, or 30.5 per cent of the BOM.

Other beneficiaries from Apple marketing include Wolfson for the audio codec, CSR for the Bluetooth chip, and Marvell for the wi-fi baseband chip.

Isuppli reckons 4.5 million of Jobs' dream machines will ship this year. µ

L'INQ
Isuppli