Samsung Semiconductor is different and separate from Samsung Telecommunications. They are all under an umbrella corporation named Samsung Electronics, and that is owned by the Samsung Group. Samsung also does ship-building (Samsung Heavy Industries), engineering, and life insurances ... ;-)
Some of these companies are getting so big that it is almost becoming possible for one division or child company to sue another child company...
I don't think that Samsung Heavy Industries is losing sleep over Apple suing Samsung Telecommunications. And it would be in the best interest of Samsung to keep their telecommunications company and semiconductor company as far apart in terms of technology so that other companies would still be willing to come to them to manufacture their parts without having to worry about Samsung putting those parts in their own devices.
You forgot manufactures cars and airplanes and constructs apartment buildings, runs a theme park more popular than Epcot center and Disney/MGM owns some department stores, makes clothes ...among many others ;)
All of Samsung earned ~$206 billion in revenue in 2010 (more than 3x Apple's) and have about 6x the number of employees. Just Samsung Electronics has an estimated market cap of around $250billion.
It's hard to tell who has who over a barrel at the moment. At Apple's volumes, can they change suppliers quickly? Can Samsung afford to piss off Apple just to get the Galaxy Tab back on the market?
According to the teardown, it is the display ($38.50). Well, that's no surprise. (In fact, I've been quoted more to replace a broken laptop display than the price of the laptop.)
The second most expensive? It's the flash memory (16GB at $26.00). Also not surprising.
What is surprising--at least to me--is the third most expensive component. That would be the camera ($13.70).
I skipped over the "mechanicals and electro-mechanicals" ($19.97) and "other parts" ($15.19) because they are not a single part or a coherent subsystem.
The camera cost explains a lot to me. I could never figure out how the iPhone was getting such great VIDEO quality out of what on the surface appears to be the same camera as on low-end cellphones and crappy webcams. I thought that maybe the iPhone had a clever software implementation of MPEG4 encoding or something.
The answer turns out to be a really good lens and really good CCD. The camera represents almost 8% of the component cost.
Another way of looking at it is that the camera represents $43.00 of the average $560.00 sale price. I'll bet that this ratio is on par with the cost of a lens+CCD inside a camcorder.
The second largest component? Industrial design. Another factor not to be discounted. And Apple has some of the best in the world.
In all this I'm assuming 5mp + HD video to be enough for a smartphone. Is it?
(Apple might improve the front camera though.)
1 minute of 1080p video is 100mb of data, which is understandable, but still too much if i want to post it to facebook or some place else over 3g, or even a open WiFi.
So as you say, 720p might really be enough for smartphones.
Specifications aren't everything, but the iPhone CCD is a 5 MP panel that's 1/3.2" diagonal. Not to look far, the Nokia N8 has an 12 MP CCD at 1/1.83" (resolution too high, but hard to argue with the sensor size). Point and shoot standalone cameras are normally around 1/2.5"; 1/1.7" is considered high end (Canon S95/G12 etc).
The iPhone lens is 3.85 mm f/2.8; the N8 is 5.4mm f/2.8; the wide end of the S95 is 6.0 mm f/2.0.
(Higher diagonal sensor sizes are better; lower lens f-numbers are generally better.)
Pixel density is calculated as a ratio of resolution to area, is usually expressed in MP/cm^2 and lower is better.
iPhone 4: 5MP, 1/1.7", area 0.15cm^2, density 32MP/cm^2
N8: 12MP, 1/1.83", area 0.38cm^2, density 31MP/cm^2
The third component, the "Applications processor" is the A4/A5 chip. Apple designed this under license from ARM and so Apple owns the IP. Samsung simply operates as a foundry.
While it is not trivial to take a chip design from one foundry to another, since the design involves process technology, etc. It is something Apple could do from generation to generation.
So, for the next iPhone that comes out this fall, it is quite possible that the FLASH could come from intel/micron, the DRAM could come from toshiba and the chip could be manufactured by intel, TSMC, or another foundry. All of these companies would be happy to have Apple's business.
No, Samsung actually designed and manufactured pretty much the entire A4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4#Design
The story seems to be different with the A5.
Sorry, what you are saying makes no sense. They designed the chip alongside of Intrinsity.
Samsung provides the same chip as a different part number:
"The resulting core, dubbed "Hummingbird", is able to run at far higher clock rates than other implementations while remaining fully compatible with the Cortex-A8 design provided by ARM. Other performance improvements include additional L2 cache. The same Cortex-A8 CPU core used in the A4 is also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC."
The phone background is gratuitous and unnecessary. The cluster of manufacturers and the products they make in the center of the infographic is so cluttered that I can't connect one side (the manufacturer) to the other (the component they provide). Presumably, the amount of area each slice occupies correlates with total share, but the lack of vertical space means the corners of these areas are diagonal in many cases, making it even harder to visually grasp.
I think Tufte would probably call this chartjunk.
Why are there two phones in the background? And with one leading to the other? Why isn't the data presented beside the label, but only after you follow a series of closely spaced lines? Why doesn't it answer the question it started with - how much is made by Samsung, clearly and comprehensively?