iPhone teardown
This is a bit off topic, but for the geeks in the room, it’s worth following the folks over at iSuppli (in El Segundo) — turned into an analyst firm some time ago, and is now regularly tearing apart new electronic items and figuring out how much they cost, what components they use, etc. Their most recent teardown is of the Apple iPhone 3GS ($178.96 in BOM costs, versus the $199 retail cost).
I used to have a boss (yep, a hardware engineering VP), who whenever anything new and electronic came in the office–be it a piece of networking equipment, a new cell phone, printer, computer, etc. — would pull out the screwdrivers and completely (and I mean, completely) disassemble the thing to figure out what it was made out of. It would get to the point where you’d have to sneak your hardware to the back corner of the lab, so you wouldn’t find it on his desk in pieces…
