The iPhone 4S

[baja_yu]

Really? Which Android phone costs $1000, or $800? And again, keep in mind that what ever the launch price of an Android phone is, it will be significantly less as time goes by, which will not be the case for iPhone.
You can see that Apple has twice the profit margin of HTC (60% vs 30%), but HTC spends only %3 on R&D and Apple spends %2, so where does HTC lose all that money? It's especially interesting to see how your arguments change and pile on as you're presenting with a few facts. Not too many posts ago it was "well Apple needs to have a high margin on iPhone because of R&D and employee salaries which costs a lot" you said (even though workers at Foxconn work for about $100-$150 per month), and now that you've seen that Apple spends less than almost any other tech company, suddenly R&D is not so important since they only have one device

And how do you comment on the memory aspect? Each iPhone is exactly the same apart from memory capacity. The retail price of 48 GB flash memory would be about $60, yet Apple charges you $300 for it.

Here's a non-iPhone one for you. 8GB (2x4GB) of RAM for the latest iMac is $400 from Apple, but you can get the same thing on Amazon for $50. Why do you think that is? Let me hear your "particularly reasonable" explanation. And before you try and explain how it's some far superior quality (to justify an eight fold price increase?!), let me tell you that it's the exact same make and model as the one that ships with the iMac from the factory, Kingston in case of my iMac.


EDIT: As for the article (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/...fit-an-iphone/), you quoted something someone said in the comments.

It's misleading to compare the Market shares of EXISTING stock phones against the market share of annual profits from sale of NEW phones; the former compares the 'static' position of each handset maker (in number of phone units) while the latter is the 'growth' of each handset maker (in profits).
One wouldn't have been able to draw the conclusions you just have by looking at these graphs without information on % change in phone units.

Why? Do you understand what he said and why? I'm no economist, so if you do please explain it to me. Or did you quote it just because it's an argument against what the article states? So until you explain it, I'll be inclined to trust what an analyst from Bernstein Research says, over what who knows who said in a comment.

EDIT2: Something to the prior discussion: http://www.mobilemag.com/2011/10/17/...i-on-iphone-4/ Now, do you, and your "educated forum user", still think the reason Siri isn't officially on iPhone 4 is because of hardware? (It's still a work in progress but considering 4S has been out for 3 days, it's amazing)