Published in Mobiles

iPhone 6S costs $245 to make

by on29 September 2015


Despite being sold for $739

Apple claims to have sold 13 million iPhone 6S and 6S Plus in the first three days and toped 10 million sales it achieved in 2015 with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. But it turns out that the new iPhone 6S costs $245 leaving room for piles of profits

.An analytic company that goes under the name of teardown.com has singled out the companies who got the design win with their chips and tech in iPhone 6S and it managed to estimate the Bill of Materials Cost. The BoM is a magical number that tells you how much these components and the assembly work cost.

The list is straight forward as Apple made its own A9 SoC (Manufactured by Samsung or TSMC). Qualcomm is making the baseband processor, Power Management, Envelope Power Tracker and RF Transceiver. Samsung manufactures the LPDDR SDRAM while Toshiba / SK Hynix manufacture NAND in 16 GB or 64 GB portions. Apple / Dialog Semi makes the part of Power Management while Apple and Cirrus Logic make the Audio CODEC. Bosh makes the Accelerometer for Apple and NOT any software that might help the iPhone 6 fiddle benchmarks. Bosh apparently offered that service it provided for former poster child of the Third Reich, VW. 
iphone6s cost

The Gyroscope and Accelerometer come from Invensense while the NFC Controller comes from NXP. The Touchscreen Controller comes from Murata/ Broadcom while the guys from Analog Devices made a great design win and profits with the Force Touch Controller. Wifi and Bluetooth comes from USI.

The most expensive components were the applications + baseband processor, display subsystem, and memory.

The Application and baseband processor cost approximately $58.50. Display with the touch screen assembly is the runner-up with $42.50 while Mechanicals and housing should cost $28.00. Radio components cost $23.50, 16GB memory another $23.50 while the other components and costs are rounded at $15.50. The camera and image components should cost $19.00 while the test, assembly and supporting materials cost $18.00.

Power management and audio components cost $7.50, Sensors cost $5.50 while the battery cost $3.50. When you put these numbers together you end up with $245 for the smallest storage on the iPhone.

According to the analysts, the iPhone 6 16GB is $228.50 a bit more than IHS's suggested price of $196 which is less than the $245. There are a few things that got more expensive for Apple. Display with the 3D touch is more expensive. It costs $58.50, or $13.50 more than with the iPhone 6. The 2GB LPDDR4 costs $16, versus the $4.50 1GB LPDDR3 in the iPhone 6. This is probably why Apple didn’t want to move to 2GB for such a long time. The new Alumimnum 7000 series that doesn’t bend costs additional $4 compared to the one that they used with the iPhone 6 which caused us endless hours of amusement..

6 versus 6S BOM

These prices are rounded and you can imagine, if any of the suppliers made only a $1 USD profit per device this means Apple would have made 13 million profit in the first three days of sales. This is why everyone is trying to be the part of the most popular phone on the world.

Since Apple sells the cheapest iPhone 6S 16GB for $739 there is a potential for the $494 per phone. The number is a bit smaller as it doesn’t include the transport of the device to the shop and the seller margin, but in case Apple sells the device on its own it makes a LOT of profit that users end up paying.

Last modified on 29 September 2015
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