> 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?

Why waste money making it stronger and thicker than it reasonably needs to 
be?  Even just 5 or 10 cents extra spent on each iPhone would equal quite a 
big amount of money overall.

> 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?

I suspect the cost of mounting the resistors can be worked out by the 
depreciation of the SMD mounting machines over the lifetime of the product, 
plus the cost of running the machine.  It's surely not very much though, 
given that you can buy loads of consumer devices with populated PCBs inside 
them for well under $10.

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