In the absence of any hard data surrounding the iPhone, news coverage has focused on whether or not it will be on time and how many pre-orders it is likely to have.
The last real effort to establish any truth about what makes up an iPhone was perhaps in January, when teardown specialists, and in particular iSuppli, did an imaginary exercise and predicted the costs of the device at $245 for the low end 4GB model and $280 for the 8GB device, with the NAND Flash at $35 and $70 respectively, the most expensive component in the design.
It was from this that all the news items saying that the device would have a 50% margin emerged.
The latest reports suggest that because one or two components are only now due to arrive at Apple’s Taiwanese partner’s manufacturing base, and they should have been there in April. Result ‘ device delay. The Chinese-language Economic Daily News says that the supplier in question, Foxlink which makes interconnects, will deliver later this month.
This has largely been denied by both Apple and AT&T who re-iterate a June delivery, but no-one would be surprised if early suppliers were air freighted, increasing costs somewhat during its first quarter, much as Sony had to do for its significantly delayed PS3. But even if shipments slip into July, no-one is going to cancel their pre-order.
One senior AT&T executive this week is quoted as saying that AT&T has more than a million customers that would like to buy an iPhone, so they are hoping that the first delivery will be 1 million devices, but didn’t know.
Apple has recently said it would change the way it planned to recognize revenue for iPhone sales, and it will now be based on a 24-month subscription model, which would include payments from AT&T, which is where the idea came from that AT&T is paying some part of its subscription prices to Apple.
Meanwhile one of the first add on products for the Apple TV was launched this week by Roxio, the subsidiary of Sonic Solutions. It launched Crunch, an application to convert other non-Apple TV compliant video formats into those that will work with Apple TV.
Cruch will convert DVD-Video (won’t that bypass the content protection ‘ no because Cruch converts DVDs made with with Toast, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, and other DVD authoring applications), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI and DivX files. In addition to converting files for Apple TV, Roxio Crunch also will output to the iPod and the soon to be released iPhone.