14 DAY TRIAL // According to the teardown analysis firm iSuppli Corp., Apple’s second take at its hobby costs the company $63.95 per unit. Fully assembled, packaged, appropriately marketed, and shipped to the Apple store or directly to the customer’s house, the new-generation Apple TV retails for $99.
iSuppli acknowledges that Apple’s second-generation Apple TV represents a dramatic departure from the original concept, revealing that “its internal design and key components are almost exactly the same as the iPad and iPod Touch,” according to the company’s teardown.
“The first Apple TV was built like a net top computer. The architecture was basically a stripped down, small-form-factor desktop PC,” observed Andrew Rassweiler, director, principal analyst and teardown services manager, for iSuppli.
“The second generation Apple TV is more like an iPad or iPod Touch with no display. The Apple TV’s A4 processor core, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip and power management chip are the same building blocks used in the, iPad, iPhone 4 and iPod Touch,” he added.
“The new Apple TV carries a Bill of Materials (BOM) of $61.98, including additional items boxes with the product, based on a preliminary estimate from iSuppli. When the manufacturing costs are added in, the second-generation Apple TV’s production cost rises to $63.95,” iSuppli writes.
The Apple-labeled A4 applications processor in the Apple TV is, obviously, the most expensive section of the device at a cost of $16.55, or 26.7 percent of the product’s bill of materials (BOM).
The memory section is the second most expensive subsystem of the Apple TV, costing $14, and accounting for 22.6 percent of the BOM.
iSuppli makes an important note saying that, although the new Apple TV indeed has 8GB of storage space, “only 6Gbytes of this NAND flash likely is available for user media storage.”
“The remaining 2Gbytes probably is reserved for the operating system,” it notes.
Another interesting find from the teardown analysis firm is that “there is an empty slot on the Apple TV’s Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that suggests Apple can at least double the NAND flash capacity if desired.”
iSuppli believes Apple forgone such plans “in order to maintain the $99 key price point.”
A summary of iSuppli’s preliminary BOM and manufacturing cost estimate for the second generation Apple TV, broken down by subsystem, is available in the table pictured above (click to enlarge).
iSuppli urges those who intend to use this information to note that “teardown assessment accounts only for hardware and manufacturing costs, and does not take into consideration other expenses such as R&D, software, licensing and royalties.”