What's the most expensive part in an iPhone at the component level?
According to the teardown, it is the display ($38.50). Well, that's no surprise. (In fact, I've been quoted more to replace a broken laptop display than the price of the laptop.)
The second most expensive? It's the flash memory (16GB at $26.00). Also not surprising.
What is surprising--at least to me--is the third most expensive component. That would be the camera ($13.70).
I skipped over the "mechanicals and electro-mechanicals" ($19.97) and "other parts" ($15.19) because they are not a single part or a coherent subsystem.
The camera cost explains a lot to me. I could never figure out how the iPhone was getting such great VIDEO quality out of what on the surface appears to be the same camera as on low-end cellphones and crappy webcams. I thought that maybe the iPhone had a clever software implementation of MPEG4 encoding or something.
The answer turns out to be a really good lens and really good CCD. The camera represents almost 8% of the component cost.
Another way of looking at it is that the camera represents $43.00 of the average $560.00 sale price. I'll bet that this ratio is on par with the cost of a lens+CCD inside a camcorder.
One thing I saw missing from all the comments and cost breakdowns is how I see the major component of the iPhone: software. The comments on the Economist seemed to be along the lines of: "see how stupid the American company is... outsourcing everything to Asian companies who are going to steal their ideas and eat their lunch".
The second largest component? Industrial design. Another factor not to be discounted. And Apple has some of the best in the world.
Very interesting. I expect Apple to keep the same camera for the upcoming iPhone (4S?) and not improving it that much for iPhone 5 (to be released one year from now?) which I guess would lower the camera's price. I also expect the other manufacturers to keep improving their cameras (even if just for marketing) which would make it at least as expensive as it is nowadays making it harder for them to lower the final price.
In all this I'm assuming 5mp + HD video to be enough for a smartphone. Is it?
I'm very pleased with the 1080p recording in my Galaxy S2, but i think whats the real issue is the file sizes.
1 minute of 1080p video is 100mb of data, which is understandable, but still too much if i want to post it to facebook or some place else over 3g, or even a open WiFi.
So as you say, 720p might really be enough for smartphones.
As more smartphones become fast enough to record and encode 1080p on the fly, they'll also become fast enough to scale 1080p down to 480p or lower for sending over 3G. In other words, if the CPU has direct access to the video encoder (and not just a pre-encoded stream of 1080p H.264 video coming from a separate camera chip), then the CPU can probably use that same encoder to transcode videos as necessary for uploading, on the fly.
Really good lens? Really good CCD? It might be better than your run of the mill Blackberry, but it's not that great.
Specifications aren't everything, but the iPhone CCD is a 5 MP panel that's 1/3.2" diagonal. Not to look far, the Nokia N8 has an 12 MP CCD at 1/1.83" (resolution too high, but hard to argue with the sensor size). Point and shoot standalone cameras are normally around 1/2.5"; 1/1.7" is considered high end (Canon S95/G12 etc).
The iPhone lens is 3.85 mm f/2.8; the N8 is 5.4mm f/2.8; the wide end of the S95 is 6.0 mm f/2.0.
(Higher diagonal sensor sizes are better; lower lens f-numbers are generally better.)
This is pretty pointless, as final image quality depends on a lot more than just the sensor, especially on a phone, but a better measurement of sensor quality is pixel size or density, as bigger pixels gather more light.
Pixel density is calculated as a ratio of resolution to area, is usually expressed in MP/cm^2 and lower is better.
iPhone 4: 5MP, 1/1.7", area 0.15cm^2, density 32MP/cm^2
N8: 12MP, 1/1.83", area 0.38cm^2, density 31MP/cm^2
As for the lens, I prefer wide angles, but again the raw numbers don't tell you much.
According to the teardown, it is the display ($38.50). Well, that's no surprise. (In fact, I've been quoted more to replace a broken laptop display than the price of the laptop.)
The second most expensive? It's the flash memory (16GB at $26.00). Also not surprising.
What is surprising--at least to me--is the third most expensive component. That would be the camera ($13.70).
I skipped over the "mechanicals and electro-mechanicals" ($19.97) and "other parts" ($15.19) because they are not a single part or a coherent subsystem.
The camera cost explains a lot to me. I could never figure out how the iPhone was getting such great VIDEO quality out of what on the surface appears to be the same camera as on low-end cellphones and crappy webcams. I thought that maybe the iPhone had a clever software implementation of MPEG4 encoding or something.
The answer turns out to be a really good lens and really good CCD. The camera represents almost 8% of the component cost.
Another way of looking at it is that the camera represents $43.00 of the average $560.00 sale price. I'll bet that this ratio is on par with the cost of a lens+CCD inside a camcorder.