iPhone 14 designers on the kick inside as BMO cost grows

Apple may no longer employ a Chief Design Officer but that doesn’t mean design has become less relevant to the company. Its designers have and always will have great insights into how the company thinks about its products, which is why today’s iPhone designer interview from Design-Milk is of such interest.

iPhone 14 designers do an inside job

Design-Milk spoke with Apple’s Richard Dinh (Senior Director, iPhone Product Design) and Francesca Sweet (Manager, Product Marketing). They wanted to talk about what’s inside the iPhone 14.

One of the big changes in the new design is that the back now separates from the enclosure. That’s important as until now all components could only be reached by removing the display.

Now that the glass comes off, it has become a little easier to repair the device – though components must adhere to a central plane as thin as 300 microns, which is now made from 7,000 series aluminium, of which 50% is recycled they said.

The chip gets more headroom

The iPhones also offer much more efficient thermal dissipation, they said. That’s useful as it means the processor inside the device can handle higher workloads. This contributes to the increased performance in these devices.

“This new internal design’s optimized heat dissipation allows for improved sustained performance while working on computationally intensive workloads like video editing or playing graphics-intensive games. So for example, both the iPhone 14 Plus and iPhone 14 can deliver up to 15% better performance than iPhone 13 even though they all share the same A15 Bionic,” said Sweet.

They also cost more to make

Interestingly, the designer comments come as Counterpoint Research publishes its own BoM analysis of iPhones, concluding that the $464 iPhone 14 Pro Max costs 3.7% more to make than the equivalent iPhone 13 model.

Apple’s A series chips account for over 22% of that cost, they said. “ Due to its more advanced 4nm process, the application processor alone is estimated to introduce a cost increase of $11, driving the processing category’s share to 20% in BoM cost.”

They also note that Apple’s self-designed components now account for over 22% of the overall cost of the iPhone.

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