Apparently This Is How Much it Costs To Make an iPhone

Thanks to Apple being an notoriously secretive company, it's always been a mystery as to just how much the device we pay hundreds of dollars for.

Mystery no more as, ABC has been given us an unprecedented glimpse inside their Chinese factories to see how iPhone devices are made.

And from this a blogger/analyst has come up with a rough estimate as to how much it would cost the company to make our smartphones, based on clues in the report.

Horace Dediu, is known for his analytic reporting on Apple's business strategy and predictions of their financials. He used two key findings from the report: that each iPhone takes 24 hours to build and that workers on the line make $1.78 an hour.

He has said the costs of making an iPhone to most likely range between $26 NZD and $62 NZD per unit.
Labor costs are a small part of the overall cost structure at between 2 percent and 5 percent of sales price.
The 141 steps of human interaction in the process could be automated. However, the fact that it isn't implies that the cost of automation would be higher and the flexibility of the automated process would be lower.

Dediu does however say that these manufacturing costs are likely to be as much as 300 per cent higher than competing devices, due to the higher level of intensity of the design and quality testing.

Source