iPhone Teardown Finds 55 Pct Profit Margin

By Nick Mokey July 3, 2007

iPhone Teardown Finds 55 Pct Profit Margin

Now that the traffic at Apple’s cash registers has slowed down and the lines of people anxious to leave $600 in the stores have left: it’s time to ask the question that everyone’s wondering: Just how much money does Apple make with the sale of every iPhone? According to iSuppli, a market research firm that has done the math – a lot.

After tearing down the iPhone and totaling the cost of its components plus estimated manufacturing costs, iSuppli calculates that the phones cost Apple around $265.83 apiece to make – leaving the company with a jaw-dropping profit margin of 55 percent.

The new data quickly makes it apparent why Apple didn’t hold back supplies to create an artificial shortage at the phone’s launch: every iPhone sold netted the company around $330 in profit. With over 500,000 phones sold in just the first weekend, the iPhone launch looks extremely successful from a financial point of view. If estimates of the phone’s cost and initial sales are correct, Apple lined its pockets with at least $165 million in a matter of days.

News of the iPhone’s lucrative potential sent traders scurrying for Apple stock on Tuesday. Shares went up $5.91, or 4.9 percent, to $127.17.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Emerging Tech

Managing Editor

As Digital Trends’ Managing Editor, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team delivering definitive reviews, enlightening…

Digital Trends Live

Digital Trends Live: Uber goes public, iPhone XR design leak, and robot butlers

episode 127 maxresdefault

On this episode of Digital Trends Live, host Greg Nibler is joined by Nicole Raney, managing editor of The Manual, to talk trending tech news, including Uber going public, the theft of $40 million in Bitcoin, iPhone XR design leaks, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin update, robot butlers, and more.

Later in the show, Nibler welcomes Sandra Oh Lin, founder and chief executive officer of KiwiCo, to discuss how its STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) inventor kit boxes can fuel the imaginations and skills of the next generation of great inventors.

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.