Free iPhone 4 Cases To Cost Apple $175 Million

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As we watched Apple’s Antennagate press conference here at the TFTS offices, some of us wondered what the cost of such a free case offering would be. Today, during Apple’s earnings call (in which they did very well, by the way), they declared that the free bumpers and cases for everybody will cost them a total of $175 million. But it’s really chump change to Apple.

In addition to the $3.25 billion in profit they made last quarter, Yahoo! Finance reports that Apple has a whopping $23 billion cash on hand. So really, when you have that much in your bank account – $175 million isn’t much.

The free case ‘deal’ goes until September, and if you expect Apple to sell another 1,000,000 iPhones by then, that would bring the grand total of iPhones to about 4 million. That means that about $40 is being devoted per iPhone out of Apple’s $175 million. Considering the cost of cases and free shipping, sounds about right to us.

Giving away free bumpers is still cheaper than a full recall and re-engineering of the iPhone 4, which some industry experts predicted would cost upward of $1.5 billion.