If you were interested in purchasing an iDevice this year, then you surely noticed that the difference between a 16 GB iPhone and a 32 GB one is €100 and it is kept in the case of the iPad tablet. You would say that Apple pays a lot of money for the NAND flash that stores the information in our iDevices since the price difference between them is so big. Well actually Apple pays only $10.72 for each 16 GB of NAND flash memory and the Americans pay this chip at a price almost 10 times higher than the one with which Apple buys it. If we are to talk about Europeans, then the difference increases even more because with us the price difference is in euros and not in dollars.
The only difference between a 16 GB iPhone 4S and the 32 GB model is 16 GB of NAND flash memory, for which Apple (AAPL) charges customers $100. But according to Bernstein Research's Toni Sacconaghi, Apple buys that memory for a heavily discounted price of $0.67 per gigabyte, or a total of $10.72.
Apple gets a lot of profit from its iDevices and this price difference between the various models of iDevices is one of the methods. Last year Apple bought almost a quarter of the entire quantity of NAND flash available globally and this allowed it to obtain such good prices, but unfortunately we, the consumers, pay dearly and heavily for the benefits obtained by Apple.
