The $1,199 iPhone 15 Pro Max (the base variant – 8/256GB) costs Apple $502 to make, a report from Counterpoint Research claims.
The BoM (that stands for “blended bill of materials”) report reveals what has changed in terms of production prices and if you’re in the mood, you could shed a tear for Apple, as each iPhone 15 Pro Max is costing them 8% more than what they paid for making the iPhone 14 Pro Max (via 9to5Mac).
That’s $37.70 more, but where does the difference come from, exactly? And is it unusual? Well, maybe, since the difference between the iPhone 14 Pro Max and the iPhone 13 Pro Max was only a 3% increase.
Where does the price hike come from?
Long story short, there are three key areas that make each iPhone 15 Pro Max more costly to produce: the 3-nanometer A17 Pro chip, the new 5x telephoto camera system that relies on a tetraprism, and the titanium frame.
“Apple’s new-generation mobile platform, the A17 Pro, uses TSMC’s most advanced 3nm fabrication technology and packs more than 19 billion transistors in a die, 18% more than that of the A16 Bionic. Thanks to the improved 6-core GPU architecture, the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s GPU performance is 20% faster”, says the report.
Costs have fallen for Apple for two important components: memory and display. Actually, Apple has upgraded the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s RAM to 8GB, which is 2GB higher than that of its predecessor. However, the global memory market was in a downtrend from Q4 2022 to Q3 2023, causing prices to fall by more than 30%. The display prices are also in a downtrend. Apart from Samsung Display, LG Display has also started supplying iPhone LTPO displays.
It’s important to note that this year, Apple has more self-designed components in the iPhone 15 line. The report has it that Apple’s self-designed components account for 25% of the total BoM cost of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, up from 22% in the iPhone 14 Pro Max last year.
Despite the increase in production costs and being the most expensive iPhone to make, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is still the model with the highest profit margin in this year’s lineup. So, save the compassion tears for another day…
