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iSuppli teardown: iPhone 3G S BOM and manufacturing cost is $178.96
El Segundo, Calif. — The teardown of the iPhone 3G S shows that the product’s component selection has had some interesting changes in parts and suppliers, according to iSuppli Corp.’s Teardown Analysis Service.
The iSuppli teardown team indicates that the entry-level, 16-Gbyte version of Apple Inc.’s new iPhone 3G S carries a bill-of-materials (BOM) cost of $172.46 and a manufacturing expense of $6.50, for a total of $178.96.
“This is slightly higher than iSuppli’s estimate of $174.33 for the original low-end 8Gbyte iPhone 3G based on pricing in July 2008. Although the retail price of the 16-Gbyte iPhone 3G S is $199, the same as for the 8-Gbyte 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,” said Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst, teardown services, for iSuppli, in a statement.
iSuppli’s table and cost data only covers the iPhone 3G S’s BOM, not other costs including software development, shipping and distribution, packaging, royalty fees and miscellaneous accessories included with each phone.
Toshiba Corp. scored the biggest single design win in the 3G S, with its 16-Gbyte multilevel-cell (MLC) NAND flash costing $24. However, iSuppli says the part is available from other sources that Apple is likely to use, in particular Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which continues to supply the iPhone’s applications processor, priced at $14.46. The applications processor is the fourth most costly component in the iPhone 3G S after the NAND flash, the display module and the touch-screen assembly, says iSuppli.
Major component drivers
In addition to faster performance, the iPhone 3G S differentiates itself from the original 3G with the addition of video capture, an autofocus 3-megapixel camera — compared to 2 Megapixels — and a built-in digital compass, but the hardware features are not much different than the 3G version, says iSuppli.
Apple has leveraged the previous BOM to optimize materials costs and take advantage of the current component price erosion throughout the industry. But there have been some key changes.
iSuppli says one of the more notable changes in hardware is the use of a Broadcom Corp. single-chip Bluetooth/FM/WLAN device, costing $5.95. Supporting the integration trend, Apple previously used two devices: a Marvell Technology Group Ltd. WLAN chip and a Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) Bluetooth IC. Apple also replaced NXP’s power management IC with a Dialog Semiconductor device, at an estimated cost of $1.30
To implement the digital compass feature, the iPhone 3G S adds AKM Semiconductor Inc.’s electronic compass and STMicroelectronics’ accelerometer, both of which are 3-axis devices. Infineon continues to supply the critical baseband chip, which accounts for $13 of the 3G S component costs. Similarly, TriQuint has kept its slot as the 3G power amplifier module supplier, supporting the tri-band HSPA functionality of the phone, says iSuppli.
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