How much of an iPhone is made by Samsung? | Hacker News Reader

How much of an iPhone is made by Samsung?

economist.com

84 pointsasifjamil31 comments

The thing to remember is that Samsung is a huge conglomerate that has many different sub-division/companies.

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 ... ;-)

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...

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.

Dunno about the rest of the world, but I don't think US courts, at least on the federal level, will accept a lawsuit between two companies under the same controlling ownership. IIRC, it violates the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution's "case or controversy" clause.

My favorite part is that Samsung also builds liquid natural gas tankers (yes, those huge 50,000 horsepower vessels)

I thought part of the current discussion was "Well, if Apple is giving Samsung grief over selling the Galaxy Tab, Samsung should make life difficult for Apple component-wise." Say if a part was magically "unavailable" for a week or two.

It's hard to tell who has who over a barrel at the moment. At Apple's volumes, can they change suppliers quickly? Can Samsung afford to piss off Apple just to get the Galaxy Tab back on the market?

They would have to imply to Apple that the part would be available if the tab went back on the market. That's extortion!

Is it illegal?

How is this different from deal making in general?

ie If you give me this then I'll give you that?

It's the negative you can't do. If you give me this, I'll give you that is fine. IF you DONT give me this, <x> is extortion.

Ah, I didn't know that.

Makes sense.

Wasn't the A4/A5 chip fabbed by Samsung? Apple doesn't have a chipmaking plant...yet. There's one part that's Apple-only.

And Samsung wouldn't have to imply anything. They could just make life harder for the iPad supply chain.

Breach of contract would just make it bad for Samsung Semiconductor, because I don't believe that Apple would leave that up to chance ...

You appear to be assuming there are no clauses regarding unforeseen production difficulties, associated supply problems, and penalties in said contract.

> Say if a part was magically "unavailable" for a week or two.

I doubt the courts would see a blatant breach of contract as "magical".

Thanks to HN, there's a few comments worth reading. The comments on the Economist site were woefully ignorant of the tech industry. Seemed like a bunch of kids with their first-year business textbook in hand and trying to sound intelligent.

You were modded down for some reason, but wow, you weren't kidding, having read some of those comments. I didn't expect to encounter a clique of barking morons in that particular context. If that's what the majority of the Economist's subscriber demographic looks like nowadays, it's not a good thing for the rest of us.

Samsung also does ship-building (Samsung Heavy Industries), engineering, and life insurances

You forgot manufactures cars and airplanes and constructs apartment buildings, runs a theme park more popular than Epcot center and Disney/MGM owns some department stores, makes clothes ...among many others ;)

All of Samsung earned ~$206 billion in revenue in 2010 (more than 3x Apple's) and have about 6x the number of employees. Just Samsung Electronics has an estimated market cap of around $250billion.

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.

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?

(Apple might improve the front camera though.)

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.

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.

Yeah, it might have been more informative to break down "Apple's slice" into NRE, SG&A, profit, etc.

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.

So the N8 has the same pixel density, twice the amount of pixels, and the iPhone is the one with the really good CCD, got it.

I didn't say that.

Yup. computator did.

Some interesting facts here, but it's very hard to pry them from this infographic, which strikes me as horribly designed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

No, Samsung actually designed and manufactured pretty much the entire A4.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4#Design

The story seems to be different with the A5.

"The Cortex-A8 core used in the A4 is thought to use performance enhancements developed by chip designer Intrinsity (which was subsequently acquired by Apple) in collaboration with Samsung."

Sorry, what you are saying makes no sense. They designed the chip alongside of Intrinsity.

Samsung provides the same chip as a different part number:

"The resulting core, dubbed "Hummingbird", is able to run at far higher clock rates than other implementations while remaining fully compatible with the Cortex-A8 design provided by ARM. Other performance improvements include additional L2 cache. The same Cortex-A8 CPU core used in the A4 is also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC."

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