R
Robert Nazarian
Guest
We posted a teardown of the Galaxy S 5 last week, which was for repair purposes, but teardowns can also give us an indication on how much the device costs the manufacturer to produce. IHS, a marketing research firm, conducted their own teardown and concluded that the Galaxy S 5 costs about $256 to build. That is $12 over last year’s Galaxy S 4 ($244).
Other than upgraded hardware, the main additions this year’s GS5 offers over last year’s GS4 is a fingerprint scanner, a biosensor, and the ability to survive a heavy dose of water. IHS concluded the fingerprint scanner costs about $4 and the biosensor runs about $1.45. There was no word on the cost of the waterproofing, but Andrew Rassweiler, and analyst at IHS did say, “Inside we see mostly a lot of recycled components that we’ve seen before. There’s really nothing special inside where Samsung is pushing the envelope. There’s no breakthroughs, there’s nothing earth-shattering. It’s really just a continuation of what has come before.”
The most expensive part is the 5.1-inch display, which runs $63. Samsung utilizes its own memory chips, which run about $33. They didn’t specify a cost for the Snapdragon 801 processor.
How does $256 compare to Samsung’s biggest competitor? Well the iPhone 5S costs Apple roughly $199, which means Apple makes a hell of a lot more money per phone. We haven’t seen estimates for the HTC One (M8) yet, but it would be interesting to see how much that beautiful design costs HTC.
source: re/code
Come comment on this article: The Galaxy S 5 costs a little more to produce than the Galaxy S 4 and lot more than the iPhone 5S
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