1GB of the flash memory alone would have cost $45,000 / €33,000 then

Feb 11, 2014 15:43 GMT  ·  By

Former Chief Evangelist of Apple Guy Kawasaki just shared this awesome fact with his 1.3 million Twitter followers. Apparently, the bill of materials for an original iPhone would have been $3.5M / €2.5M in 1991.

That’s right, the flash memory alone would make up one third of that price. From Holy Kaw/Alltop:

“1GB flash memory: $45,000 in 1991 vs. $0.55 today. Thus, 32GB flash memory = $1.44 million. Apple’s processor, which produces about 20,500 millions of instructions per second: $620,000 in 1991.”

The rest of the price is made up of costs of mobile communication, manufacturing, and other stuff. In fact, the full $3.5M / €2.5M sum doesn’t even cover some key components, such as the motion detectors and the camera. The OS and the display are also not taken into account, mainly because they couldn’t be quantified.