>> I note that with all the sophisticated technology in this device, the
>> single most expensive component is... the display?!
>
> It's a nice display though :-)

I saw an iPhone in real life for the very first time on Saturday. It is 
actually a nice display. If you can see through all the fingerprints. ;-)

>> I'm also surprised at just how cheap the casing is; you would have
>> thought making something that can survive being sat on, dropped on the
>> pavement, rained on or flushed down a toilet would be very expensive.
>> But apparently not.
>
> Those parts are typically quite cheap to produce in high volume, once
> you have the tooling done it's just injecting cheap plastic into a mould
> or cutting and folding sheets of cheap metal.

If metal and plastic are "cheap", then why does everything get made out 
of the most skimpy amounts of material the manufacturers can get away 
with so that it's only just barely strong enough to not break?

>> (Strictly, they list the cost of the materials, not the cost of
>> actually assembling them.)
>
> The list is the amount you pay to buy those components (which includes
> the sub-assembly needed for those individual components), on top of that
> price there is about another $10 to assemble that lot together into an
> iPhone.

Now, see, I would have thought just surface-mounting the 2,157 
individual resistors would cost more than $10... But what do I know 
about anything?

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