Apple kept the base price for its newest phone the same, at $649 -- nearly three times the build costs. An Apple representative didn't respond to a request for comment. The rise in manufacturing and materials costs -- but not the price to customers -- points to a maturing phone market, where most anyone who wants a smartphone already has one. That means that Apple, Samsung and other manufacturers don't have many places to go to find new customers. Instead they need to work harder to persuade their current users to upgrade to the newest device or try to steal customers from another manufacturer. All this heated competition should cut into Apple's profitability; it's already reported two straight quarters of weaker iPhone sales.
"Consumers are much more sophisticated, they demand more," IHS Markit analyst Wayne Lam said in an interview, "So innovation will keep coming and costs will creep up."To help boost sales, Apple has been coaxing customers to buy more expensive models, including the larger iPhone 7 Plus or iPhones with more storage, For the iPhone 7, the look of the phone is the same as from the last two years, but the company added water resistance, a new processor, new display, new camera and updated the home button, The company also eliminated the headphone jack to make room for iphone case glass a larger battery and its haptic motor..
Even though the iPhone 7 is costlier for Apple, the company has still managed to keep costs in check better than Samsung, Lam said. It costs Samsung about $265 to make its Galaxy S7 phone, but the company sells the device for roughly the same price as the iPhone 7. According to a new teardown from IHS Markit, the cost to make the device jumped about 18 percent compared with last year's model. All that new tech crammed into the new iPhone 7 isn't coming cheap for Apple. Apple's materials and manufacturing costs for the phone total $224.80, according to a teardown estimate by researcher IHS Markit on Tuesday. That's up about 18 percent from the iPhone 6S, released last year.
It has long been rumored that Google would make its own house-branded phone by the end of 2016, and the company has been widely expected to host an event in October that would focus on several hardware announcements, including a new phone and a 4K Chromecast, The invitations arrive a little more than two weeks after Google confirmed it had suspended plans for its Project Ara, an ambitious attempt to iphone case glass build a phone that lets you swap out parts like Lego blocks, The phones are expected to be called the Pixel and Pixel XL, according to a report by Android Police, The Pixel phone, the smaller of the two, could start at $649, the website said, Google rebranding the phones with the Pixel name would mean a departure from the company's Nexus moniker, which it has used since 2008..
The tech giant is also expected to give more details about Google Home, a new smart speaker that will compete with Amazon Echo as an always-listening virtual assistant, and to reveal its design for its Daydream VR, a hardware and software platform to help any Android phone manufacturer create its own VR headset. Google's new hardware may get top billing at the event, but -- perhaps more importantly to Google -- the company is looking to highlight its new software, the Google "assistant." The software is powered by artificial intelligence, and the idea is for the software to learn about you and your behavior so it can provide answers catering specifically to you. Google unveiled the assistant at its I/O developer conference in May. CEO Sundar Pichai told CNET at the time that the software is the future of Google.
