Hacker News Reader

Comment by JosephRedfern | Hacker News Reader

> Both the earphones and chargers retail for $19 USD each and since these items are usually cheaper to produce, Apple is saving approximately $35 USD per device.

I'm curious as to where this $35 USD figure came from. I'd be very surprised if headphones/chargers only had a ~8% margin.

I'd (perhaps naively) guess that at Apple's scale, we'd be talking low single digits for wired headphones/chargers.

View on HN

Generic 20W USB-C chargers retail at about $8-$15 on Amazon. Apple's are probably better designed than the lowest grade of chargers, but on the other hand we have to subtract the profit margins of seller and Amazon and account for Apple's scale, so $8 sounds like a reasonable first estimate for what it costs Apple to make them. And I can't imagine the earphones costing more than $5 to make.

Apple's chargers are a lot better engineered than the cheap ones on Amazon. Ken Shiriff did a teardown of one.[0] However, he does point out the "Apple Tax" their chargers have:

> Samsung sells a very similar cube charger for about $6-$10, which I also disassembled (and will write up details later). The Apple charger is higher quality and I estimate has about a dollar's worth of additional components inside. But it sells for $20 more.

[0]: https://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown...

Except for the 11 Pro Max which came with an 18W charger, Apple only shipped 5W chargers they made themselves, so the COGS at that scale must have been extremely low, i'd have to imagine under $5 for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com