Wired
In the smartphone market, Apple is an indicator of existence. Although the global sales volume cannot beat Samsung, it can only rank second, but it can earn most of the profits of the entire industry, and its ability to attract gold is beyond the table. Apple’s money is reflected in almost every link, such as upgrading the flash memory capacity, it can also make a lot of money.
Two years ago, the storage capacity of the iPhone still started from 64GB. Such storage capacity is really not enough. In recent years, it has changed from 128GB, but the price gap of large-capacity models has also widened.
Taking the iPhone 14 as an example, the 128GB version starts at $799, the 256GB version starts at $899, and the 512GB version starts at $1,099. Adding 128GB of capacity is almost a $100 price increase, and the same is true for the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
For that extra $100, how much does 128GB of flash cost? The iPhone 14 series mainly uses 112-layer stacked 3D TLC flash memory from KIOXIA and Western Digital, with a core capacity of 512Gb. Simply looking at the cost of flash memory, the cost is less than $5, and the entire cost of the UFS 128GB module is about $10.
In this way, the capacity of the iPhone 14 increases by 128GB, and the cost increases by $10, but Apple’s price increases by $100, that is, 90% of the profit is taken by Apple.
For this alone, Apple can make high profits that the Android brand will never make, or the premium of a flash memory chip is enough to be the gross profit of the Android brand’s entire mobile phone.
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