Is it possible to open up an iPhone and take out the memory card and replace it?

No it isn't possible, practically speaking. It's soldered onto the main board and in all likelihood you don't possess or have access to the precision tools and robots that could possibly remove the chips safely and not damage anything.

 

Yes...please make a diy out of it and post your results

 

The built in memory is not an SD card.

 

no

 

Trust me you do not want removable storage. Removable micro SD cards are over 14 times slower than the internal flash memory. They will load programs slower than either LTE or wifi connections and will take 4 minutes to load a typical game. Cloud storage is much better than removable sotrage in every way for phones in the current state of the technology.

Like someone else said, you need a factory and a set of precision robots to remove the memory, just swap the phone out.

The extra memory may cost apple $42 but that's because they get extreme bulk discounts, the high speed flash memory to a consumer would cost $80 at the lowest to an average of $110 on the open market so even if you could replace it yourself, you'd pay a lot of money. $200 isn't as bad as people make it out to be considering it's high speed flash memory.

 

That doesn't take into account R&D, distribution costs, etc.. but yeah, each phone has a huge profit margin. Just keep in mind every other company does the same thing too, Samsung especially- so don't just call Apple out.

 

The scanner caddy on them is also made for iPhone models too. I have a couple for development.

 

They retail on the same level as the iPhone, it's important to know because you need to be aware of the competition as well.. without competition the iPhone would honestly be nothing. Also, yeah I get very upset no one knows anything about what the retail value is. People think I am a fool for paying anymore than $200 for an iPhone, but of course they just pull out daddy's credit card and resign their crazy contracts..

 

The purpose of all companies is to make money.Period. And they have over $100 Billion in the bank. Still doesn't make them a charity.

 

$230 but quality control is throwing out 30% of phones now. No other company would do that. Also to pre-order customers they shipped them by air mail across the world from the factory. That costs $30 per phone.

They are selling them for $700 on average since most models are 16GB, or 32GB, meaning that before R&D, opperating costs etc, they are only making 100% profit over cost. Out of the 17.5 billion in profit on 50 million sales per year, they spend about 3 billion per year on R&D and patents (purchases and service fees), plus another 1 billion per year to buy the technology companies needed to give you the latest tech in the iPhone alone (maps, fingerprint scanning, Siri etc), next they have to pay for the warranty which accounts for another 10% of the price, they also offer free training, customer service, phone support etc, all of that cost them 4.5 billion.


In the end only 25% of that $700 is profit. Not 75% as you make it out to be.

AND on top of all that they let you swap your phone for a replacement if you break it for less than their manufacturing cost if you break it. No othe manufacturer does that, you have to buy a new phone.

So yeah I consider that a pretty decent deal.

 

And they say there's no such thing as a dumb question

 

That's not the point- it's just they honestly believe the phone is only worth $200.

 

unless you secretly tell the apple tech you have to replace it with a board that has a 64gb on it.

 

Nice post. I suspect, actually, that the $225 you pay for an iPhone 5 replacement is exactly the manufacturing cost of the phone. It matches up very closely with estimates of the manufacturing cost, and it makes a lot of sense:
1. You've already paid full price (via carrier subsidy, etc.) for your iPhone, so they have no need to recoup R&D costs, etc.
2. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to sell you a cheaper iPhone, because it keeps you in the ecosystem. If they charged full price for a new phone, most people would buy a cheap android phone to use while they waited out their contract, and then may never come back to Apple.
3. But I don't believe its in Apple's genes ever to lose money on anything. And so that's why I think they're at least getting back their manufacturing costs when you pay $225 for a new iPhone