Though the 5.5-inch screen of the iPhone 6 Plus...

Though the 5.5-inch screen of the iPhone 6 Plus is 38 percent larger than the 4-inch screen of the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 6 Plus costs only 15 percent more to build, said a preliminary analysis by the website Teardown.com (http://bit.ly/1mycAVA). The estimated combined cost of Apple’s new A8 processor with Qualcomm’s MDM9625M modem is the largest chunk ($59.50) of the phone’s total cost ($242.50), the site said. The 5.5-inch display and touchscreen assembly costs $51, while a Toshiba-sourced NAND flash device adds $9 and a Samsung DRAM chip, $5, it said. The site pegs no estimated cost for the NXP Semiconductor PN548 device that brings near field communication functionality to an iPhone for the first time. The same PN548 component is housed within the iPhone 6, which costs $227 to build, including $41.50 for the 4.7-inch display and touchscreen assembly, the site said. “Some key notes on the assembly included our analysts observing that the board design and the use of ’tried and true’ chipsets allowed Apple to maintain a high margin on the devices,” the site said. With a two-year contract, pricing starts at $299 for the iPhone 6 Plus, and at $199 for the iPhone 6, both for the versions with 16 GB of onboard storage. However, without the two-year activation, the phones cost hundreds of dollars more. Verizon, for example, has priced the iPhone 6 at $649 and the iPhone 6 Plus at $749 without the two-year contract.