How much of an iPhone is made by Samsung?

The thing to remember is that Samsung is a huge conglomerate that has many different sub-division/companies.<p>Samsung Semiconductor is different and separate from Samsung Telecommunications. They are all under an umbrella corporation named Samsung Electronics, and that is owned by the Samsung Group. Samsung also does ship-building (Samsung Heavy Industries), engineering, and life insurances ... ;-)<p>Some of these companies are getting so big that it is almost becoming possible for one division or child company to sue another child company...<p>I don't think that Samsung Heavy Industries is losing sleep over Apple suing Samsung Telecommunications. And it would be in the best interest of Samsung to keep their telecommunications company and semiconductor company as far apart in terms of technology so that other companies would still be willing to come to them to manufacture their parts without having to worry about Samsung putting those parts in their own devices.

What's the most expensive part in an iPhone at the component level?<p>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.)<p>The second most expensive? It's the flash memory (16GB at $26.00). Also not surprising.<p>What is surprising--at least to me--is the third most expensive component. That would be the camera ($13.70).<p>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.<p>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.<p>The answer turns out to be a really good lens and really good CCD. The camera represents almost 8% of the component cost.<p>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.

Some interesting facts here, but it's very hard to pry them from this infographic, which strikes me as horribly designed.<p>The phone background is gratuitous and unnecessary. The cluster of manufacturers and the products they make in the center of the infographic is so cluttered that I can't connect one side (the manufacturer) to the other (the component they provide). Presumably, the amount of area each slice occupies correlates with total share, but the lack of vertical space means the corners of these areas are diagonal in many cases, making it even harder to visually grasp.<p>I think Tufte would probably call this chartjunk.

I understand the desire for these news websites to have a visual that can be called an Infographic - it is hot link bait these days. But this one is so poorly designed that it's unworthy.<p>Why are there two phones in the background? And with one leading to the other? Why isn't the data presented beside the label, but only after you follow a series of closely spaced lines? Why doesn't it answer the question it started with - how much is made by Samsung, clearly and comprehensively?

Of the three components that Samsung manufactures for Apple, two of them are commodities: Flash and DRAM. Apple can source these elsewhere should it need to, without much hassle.<p>The third component, the "Applications processor" is the A4/A5 chip. Apple designed this under license from ARM and so Apple owns the IP. Samsung simply operates as a foundry.<p>While it is not trivial to take a chip design from one foundry to another, since the design involves process technology, etc. It is something Apple could do from generation to generation.<p>So, for the next iPhone that comes out this fall, it is quite possible that the FLASH could come from intel/micron, the DRAM could come from toshiba and the chip could be manufactured by intel, TSMC, or another foundry. All of these companies would be happy to have Apple's business.