Quote Originally Posted by baja_yu View Post
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
How about this: if you can find me the base model of a high end droid or two that was initially released for less than $800, I shall agree with you. Or, we can just stop talking about it altogether, it's up to you.

I'm pretty sure I said "all companies" not specifically Apple. (I was referring to the staff at Apple and at Apple stores, not manufacturer staff.) Yeah, I was thinking that Apple's R&D was quite a lot (and the same with other companies) but it seems I was wrong. It makes sense that Apple's R&D would be significantly less considering they make fewer devices overall.
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.
Apple charges you an additional hundred to double the memory capacity up to 64GB starting at $799 up to $999.
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.
To be honest I don't believe the RAM is identical, however the differences are small and at best would increase the price by a few dollars. (I'd rather not get into that though, we've already got enough arguments going on here and it doesn't matter either way.) Oh, and it's $200 to "upgrade" from 2x2GB ($25) of RAM to 2x4GB ($50) of RAM, not $400.

And the reason Apple charges more for upgrades than their competitors is 1) they can, and 2) they only update RAM prices when there's a refresh for whichever particular product it's being sold with, which means they don't decrease prices as RAM becomes cheaper.
EDIT: As for the article (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/...fit-an-iphone/), you quoted something someone said in the comments.

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.
It wasn't just one commenter, it was four, five or maybe even more. The reason I think it's misleading is because it appears that a company with such a small market share is making so much profit compared to everyone else.

The problem with that article is that most, if not all of these companies also make standard cellphones which sell by the millions, e.g Nokia, which skews the results because of the sheer amount of them compared to smartphones. Of course Apple is going to be making a lot more of the profit when there's cellphones involved.

What would be good to see is a smartphone comparison which included only HTC, Samsung, and Apple and to include not only percentages, but growth rates and absolute numbers. (Out of curiosity, does Samsung and HTC sell cellphones as well? Or do they only sell smartphones?)
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)
That's not "running" that's just the UI. When they've got Siri working, shoot me the link and I'll eat my words. Here's some of the posts I've read by this "educated user" which is why I suspect they won't get it working properly (accurately, with low data usage, and quickly).

(Regarding getting it working on iPhone 4)
Unless they can come up with a clever work-around, no, it won't. The fourier comb amd Markov filter -- essential to turnning a stream of words into a tiny handful of contextually-cogent bytes -- runs in one of the two PowerVR GPU cores that is in the newer A5. The 4S has extra links between the GPU output and the baseband chip so that the Siri application has its own dedicated connection to the cloud processing farms (currently, just the one in Philadelphia), piggybacked on the primary stream to and from the cell.
Fraid not, ol' bean - the stock 4 doesn't hae the graphics grunt. The original Siri ran on a 3G, but it was sluggish and used an awfully huge amount of data to send the speech back to the Siri datacenter for processing. The new incarnation uses one of the two PowerVR graphics cores in the A5 to reduce the spoken queries into a tiny handful of bytes.
(Regarding having low data usage.)
Yes, it will -- although thanks to some very clever tricks that can turn a twenty-second-long verbal query into a data-packet that's less than one hundred bytes, the impact won't be huge. Speech responses to your iDevice will also be microscopic.
(Regarding background noise)
Siri's input filter software runs in one of the PowerVR GPU cores and uses narrow multiple bandpassing to home in on vocal structures.
I'm waiting for Anandtech's article which I really hope will be incredibly detailed and cover these things, and why it can or can't be used on the iPhone 4 or previous generation devices, as well as every other aspect of the device.