Apple’s iPhone X is significantly below expectations, some reports say, while others claim the opposite. The $999 entry price is one of the main reasons why the iPhone X isn’t selling as good as some expected. There are plenty of ways to make it more tolerable, including trade-in deals and installment plans. But that’s still plenty of money to pay for a smartphone, especially in international markets.
A new report now claims that Apple’s next-gen 5.85-inch OLED iPhone X will be cheaper to produce. But will it be less expensive for customers?
Apple was able to reduce the manufacturing bill of materials by 10% for this year’s cheapest iPhone X model, Digitimes Research analyst Luke Lin discovered. The iPhone X currently costs more than $400 to make.
Apple has reportedly finalized its lineup for the 2018 iPhone X series. We’re looking at three smartphones in total, including two OLED-based iPhones (5.85-inch and 6.45-inch) and an LCD model (6.1-inch).
The 2018 5.85-inch iPhone X might be priced as the cheapest option of the three, Lin says, without specifying an actual price quote. Apple could always keep in place the $999 price tag for the cheapest iPhone X, but that would mean it would have no brand new iPhone in the $650 to $850 price range.
Apple had been working on a 5.85-inch LCD iPhone X, the report notes, but that version was recently dropped.
The cost of OLED panels is one reason why the iPhone X is so expensive. But it looks like Apple reached an agreement with Samsung Display to secure “satisfactory terms” that will prevent cost increases in the future. The report also notes that Apple pulled in a lot fewer OELD panels from Samsung than it had committed.
Digitimes says that some of the recent 2018 5.8-inch iPhone X engineering samples adopted “lower-level specifications or lower capacities” than those of the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone, with LPDDR memory being one of the major differences. Does that mean the cheaper iPhone X will have less RAM? Or worse RAM? We have no idea at this point, and these are unconfirmed rumors.
