A new estimate says Samsung’s Galaxy S8 costs much more to make than Apple’s iPhone 7

pulse

April 21, 2017 5:50 PM

Samsung's Galaxy S8 is more expensive than most top-tier smartphones, but there may be a good reason for that.

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Samsung’s Galaxy S8 phones are officially on sale, but don’t expect to grab one for cheap. The entry-level Galaxy S8 starts at $720, about $70 more than competing flagships like Apple’s iPhone 7 and Google’s Pixel. And that’s just on Verizon; with other carriers, it starts as high as $750. The Galaxy S8+ goes for even more.

But as this chart from Statista shows, Samsung has some justification for the price premium. According to recent estimates from analytics firm IHS Markit, the cost of the materials and manufacturing needed to put the Galaxy S8 together is a good ways higher than any other major flagship on the market.

IHS Markit says that entry-level model — what with its high-end chipset, larger-than-usual internal storage, and big, curved OLED display — sets Samsung back $307.50. That’s $36 more than last year’s Galaxy S7 Edge, $22 more than the Pixel, and $83 more than the iPhone 7, according to IHS Markit’s past estimates.

That said, you might want to take all this with at least some grain of salt. Apple CEO Tim Cook is no fan of these sort of estimates, for one, famously saying that he’s “never seen one that’s even close to accurate” in an earnings call back in 2015. Nevertheless, with a redesigned, high-end iPhone 8 rumored to be on the horizon, it seems like the big smartphone makers are ready to pony up a bit more to sell slicker hardware.

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