High-end and popular smartphone models, right after being released to the market, will be quickly "dissected" by technology experts to discover the internal components to assess the ease of repair, as well as to determine the total cost of all the components that make up the product.
The iPhone 16 series released by Apple at the end of September is no exception.
Accordingly, experts from financial company TD Cowen "dissected" the iPhone 16 Pro Max 256GB memory version (starting at $1,199) and estimated the total cost of components to create this smartphone, including the price of the box and assembly process... is $486.
This is $33 more than the total cost of components to make an iPhone 15 Pro Max with 256GB of storage.
TD Cowen listed and compared the detailed prices of each component on the iPhone 16 Pro Max with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the results showed that almost all components on the iPhone 16 Pro Max are more expensive than the components of the "senior" version.
The two most expensive components in the iPhone 16 Pro Max are the screen ($80) and the rear camera cluster ($80), both of which account for 16% of the total cost of the product. The rear camera cluster is also the component with the highest price increase on the iPhone 16 Pro Max compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
TD Cowen said the cost of the rear camera cluster of the iPhone 15 Pro Max is $70, while the corresponding component of the iPhone 16 Pro Max costs $80. This is understandable when Apple upgraded the wide-angle camera on the iPhone 16 Pro Max to 48 megapixels, instead of 12 megapixels like the old version.
Thus, the total component cost of the iPhone 16 Pro Max only accounts for about 40% of the product's retail price. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is also Apple's most expensive iPhone ever.
However, it should be noted that the figure given by TD Cowen is only an estimated cost of hardware components and assembly, while the total value of a device must also take into account the costs of product research and development, technology development, software development, marketing, product distribution to the market...
