Low-End iPad mini Carries $188 Bill of Materials, Teardown Analysis Reveals | Hacker News Reader

Low-End iPad mini Carries $188 Bill of Materials, Teardown Analysis Reveals

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25 pointsbrianchu19 comments

A little off topic but having used the iPad Mini for a few days I'm convinced it will dominate iPad sales in the near future. Even today I think the form factor makes up for the lack of a Retina display. I happily switched from the 3rd generation iPad to the iPad Mini. I'll miss the Retina display (temporarily) but I won't miss the bulk of the 9.7" iPad. My iPad Mini has already left my house more times than my iPad 9.7" has. It may not seem like a big difference but being able to pocket the iPad Mini in a jacket actually makes it a lot more like a big iPhone than a small iPad IMO.

Aren't the controls a bit tiny? Don't you mis-tap controls (in Safari, for example)? That's my biggest concern because even on my iPad 2, I sometimes mis-tap buttons and controls (haven't seen an iPad mini in person yet)...

Aren't the controls a bit tiny?

No. The controls are literally identical in size to the iPhone. It's the big iPad's controls that are oversized.

We've always been at war with 9.7"

A good but not ridiculous markup for the base model when dealer margin and other costs are taken into account. I don't know what the retailer margin is although I suspect it is very low for Apple as there is so little discounting.

What makes it even better is Apple's ability to hold the price through the product life while many of their costs will fall so margin in 6 months time will be even better.

The markups on bigger memory and 3G/LTE are massive too.

Exactly. When they do a Retina display / A6 next year the margins will be lower yet the retail price will remain the same. They have to factor that in from the start. Apple almost never paints themselves into a corner on pricing.

That figure by itself doesn't mean much. But does anyone have a comparison to the iPad.. Maxi? I'd be interested to know which one has higher profit margins.

Definitely the maxi. http://goo.gl/d61qY

And the iPad 2 that they're still selling.

and for only seventy dollars more for a new one, buying refurbished puts it down to a size issue as the cost difference is not noticable

So going on the 3mil figure they put out, that was around $400mil profit in 3 days.

That was only materials and manufacturing costs. The real margin is lower. Subtract advertising, software development, hardware design, etc

ntm shipping

Shipping is inconsequential. How many iPad mini's fit in a shipping container?

This may not matter, but Apple tends to ship each unit by air from the factory to the customer which should cost considerably more than containers. (example: http://www.cultofmac.com/192038/look-at-all-these-iphone-5s-... )

A shipping container last time I looked cost $6k. Air freights really won't add that much cost to something the weight of the iPad, less than a dollar.

True. But those are fixed costs that can be spread out over millions of devices. Some estimate that 2 million iPad Mini's were sold this weekend (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233257/iPad_Mini_iPa...). Given that a couple more millions will be sold in the future, you could accommodate $10mil+ for a few bucks.

Note that the 3 million figure is for both the new iPad and the iPad Mini.

it wasn't 3. that was for all ipads. 2-2.5 for ipad mini: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57545123-37/ipad-mini-eati...

It's actually much larger. The upgraded have much higher profit margins.

>"The incremental cost of the additional NAND flash memory to Apple is only $9.60 for the additional 16GBytes of memory and $19.20 for an additional 32GBytes of memory. This means that compared to the 16GByte model, the 32GByte version of the iPad mini generates about $90 in additional profit for Apple for every unit sold. For the 64GByte model, Apple’s profit is about $171 higher than the 16GByte version."

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