SAN FRANCISCO — Apple's recently released iPhone X carries a bill-of-materials (BoM) cost of roughly $370.25, the highest ever for an iPhone, according to a teardown analysis conducted by IHS Markit.
With a retail price of $999, the iPhone X with 64 GB of NAND memory is also the most expensive iPhone to date, allowing Apple to maintain its typically high margins on the device, according to IHS. By comparison, the firm noted that Samsung’s Galaxy S8 with 64 GB of NAND memory has a BoM of $302 and retails at around $720.
"The iPhone X is the most expensive iPhone ever made, and it has the highest retail price tag of comparable flagship phones, catapulting the smartphone industry to an entirely new price point," said Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of cost benchmarking services at IHS Markit, in a press statement.
The IHS teardown of the iPhone X follows other teardowns conducted by TechInsights, iFixit and others. The teardowns have found that Apple employed a combination of new and old tricks to pack features into its new flagship smartphone, including two substrate-like PCBs, a two-piece battery and a time-of-flight sensor and IR camera.
Andrew Rassweiler
Rassweiler said that while the iPhone X represents Apple's biggest step forward in design since the original iPhone in 2007, the smartphone's underlying architecture is similar to that of the iPhone 8 Plus.
"Both models share platform-common components, but the X’s superior screen and TrueDepth sensing set the phone apart and contribute to its higher cost," Rassweiler said.
— Dylan McGrath is the editor-in-chief of EE Times.
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