Now that the traffic at Apple’s cash registers has slowed down and the lines of people anxious to leave $600 in the stores have left: it’s time to ask the question that everyone’s wondering: Just how much money does Apple make with the sale of every iPhone? According to iSuppli, a market research firm that has done the math – a lot.
After tearing down the iPhone and totaling the cost of its components plus estimated manufacturing costs, iSuppli calculates that the phones cost Apple around $265.83 apiece to make – leaving the company with a jaw-dropping profit margin of 55 percent.
The new data quickly makes it apparent why Apple didn’t hold back supplies to create an artificial shortage at the phone’s launch: every iPhone sold netted the company around $330 in profit. With over 500,000 phones sold in just the first weekend, the iPhone launch looks extremely successful from a financial point of view. If estimates of the phone’s cost and initial sales are correct, Apple lined its pockets with at least $165 million in a matter of days.
News of the iPhone’s lucrative potential sent traders scurrying for Apple stock on Tuesday. Shares went up $5.91, or 4.9 percent, to $127.17.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.