The Jeff Beckham Weblog

While many folks spent the weekend playing with their iPhone, an Austin company spent those days taking one apart.

Austin-based Portelligent is a “teardown firm”: they take the latest consumer electronics and (yikes!) disassemble them, looking for the details of construction, component suppliers, and cost data to inform companies about what their competitors are putting into their latest devices and how much they cost to build.

Business Week says that Portelligent’s analysis estimates that the iPhone’s materials cost Apple $220, plus final assembly. The iPhone sells for $499 for a 4-gigabyte version and $599 for an 8-gigabyte version.