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This is not confirmed as Pegatron CEO has said they have many options. But many number of Indonesian government official has been claiming / throwing out numbers like these out of no where. 

That is $380 inc. VAT, which is about 18%, without VAT, it would be about $320. I guess this is roughly inline if iPhone 6s were still in the market. As it should be $100 less than the iPhone 7 which is $449 ( if I remember correctly ). 

There is also a 10% cash back deal with certain credit card and debit card. That brings this down to $288. Pretty damn good if you ask me.

I wonder if iPhone 7 will be this price in India once 2019 iPhone comes. I think the iPhone 7 is a pretty damn good phone for this $320. For those who are still new to Smartphone or jumping from other Android. 

Metriacanthosaurus said:

It’s always the same story. Our puny minds can’t comprehend the expenses Apple has. Well, every company has expenses that are not materials cost. Is that really the customer’s burden to bear? I think what customers want is for some of that past R&D to start to amortize, and result in stable product lines. This unpredictable continuous rise in prices for no compelling reason has everyone concerned. 

Meanwhile, our puny minds can comprehend the balance sheet, and profit is obscene. The same old story doesn’t fly. 

Dont get get me wrong I think it’s perfectly fine for Apple to have a wide line of iPhone, but they’ve pushed the envelope on what a flagship model can cost and they’re not doing anything they weren’t doing 5 years ago when a flagship iPhone was $650. 

TL;DR -  Innovation is getting more expensive.

It is not unpredictable. It has been the case ever since we finally see the end of Moore's law. It is just most people 1. Did not bother to google and known enough about the topic, 2. Media did an absolutely appalling job, not only did they not understand it themselves, they didn't bother to report it since it is not click baiting enough.

Ever since the Smartphone Revolution, which kicks off a whole lots of other advancement in every computing industry ( or arguably in every industry ), the engineering cost of components and products has been steadily rising. From the Machines that design and Manufacturer the Chips, Engineers wages that has sky rocketed, to Tools required for QA and design, every single part of the process has shoot up in price. That is not including the fact R&D are getting harder as we reach some fundamental limits. It is likely to cost $1B to Fab an TSMC 5nm Chip. That is excluding the cost to ARM and other IP Price. You can literally count with your fingers Companies that has this budget and a market to sell these chips.

Consumer don't see these price increase because most of these R&D were spread to a much larger usage base, 1.3B Annual Smartphones sales compared to ~250M PC, a total of 10-100x increase in Global Mobile Revenue that drives the innovation in 4G and 5G as well as other advancement in the backend. Because the market were so much larger these technologies manage to recoup their R&D and made a handsome profits while charging you tiny amount of money.

But now the Smartphone Market has reached the end of its growth curve and a stage of saturation. Smartphone has reached roughly 80% of the total addressable market, that is world population minus infants and elderly. With the rest concerning more about Food and Water. Smartphone cycle are now longer than 3 years, and trending towards 4. There will be less Smartphone sold every year. ( And one reason why the media and marketing are trying to hype up 5G to force a upgrade cycle )

So what used to be an $1B R&D that spread over 400M iPhones in 2 years time, will now cost $3B R&D that spread over 300M iPhones in 3 years time. That is $0.25 / Unit as compared to  $1 / unit. The numbers are not absolute, they just shows the scale of differences. ( The 400M unit were with respect to most of the early iPhones sold were cutting edge model, the recent iPhone has a much wider spread on older model, which means R&D cost on leading model and spread over a lower volume )

Of Course some of these are over simplified. For example with a 5% decline on Smartphone unit sold causes an avalanche to NAND and DRAM Price ( No, there isn't a cartel in recent NAND and DRAM pricing despite what ever that makes you believe ) Display Prices from OLED and LCD are dropping fast as well due to capacity needed to fill. So some of these will off set the cost of rising R&D. But as a general trend, Tech innovation is only going to get more expensive, and the industry now worries at their 5G investment will take longer to recoup. 

derekcurrie said:

Recent iOS devices take advantage of the GPU technology recent developed by ARM for their chip designs. That's not going to translate into GPUs for Macs, which are going to continue to use Intel CPU technology (despite uniformed rumors to the contrary). But that doesn't mean Apple can't create their own GPU tech for Macs. I personally would be surprised if Apple bothered, seeing as the company has blatantly suffered from what I call Mac Malaise for over three years. (Kick 🦵 Boot  👢 Prod ⚡). Staying out of GPU patent lawsuits is of course a further concern.

I don't see any part of the A11 GPU developed by ARM. 

maestro64 said:

I am sorry I really do not want the likes of Amazon or Google have this much access in my home. It bad enough that Google and Facebook got caught putting VPN software on people phones which routed all your data through their servers so they can see what you were doing when not using their apps. Think about if they have access to your home network.

Blame this on Apple. They should never have left the Router Market in the first place, and even if they did, they could still have bought Eero, which was widely recommended as the Airport replacement by multiple Apple Fan Site. And Eero could have been left running independently like File Maker, wouldn't even cost Apple a dime.

And now we have Amazon.