With all the talk about the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, ahead of next week’s Unpacked event, there’s quite a bit of inside-baseball posts coming out on X, including this one from @_TheJasonC, who is posting random numbers about how much each component costs to upgrade.
To their credit, they do say that these are estimates, but it’s still important to take this with a grain of salt. Especially considering they believe Samsung is using the “Snapdragon 8 Gen 5” and not the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. This user believes that Samsung is paying between $6 and $18 more for the “Snapdragon 8 Gen 5”.
The user goes on to list a bunch of the other hardware upgrades here, including upgrades to the display, which would cost $4 to $12 more per unit versus the Galaxy S25 Ultra. And even the upgrade to 60W charging, which apparently costs $2 to $6 more per unit.
Towards the end of the post, they tally up the cost for 15 million units, which would put a variable cost of around $315 million to $1.04 billion, one-time engineering at $180 million to $620 million. Bringing the total for the upgrade program to $495 million to $1.65 billion. And the “realistic per-unit increase” is $21 to $69.
Of course, none of this includes marketing, R&D, and other things Samsung has to pay for, like logistics. Shipping these devices around the world is not cheap and is factored into the price. It also says nothing about the increase in RAM and NAND prices, which, despite using the same RAM and storage as last year, is still an increase Samsung has to account for.
So we could see a $100 price increase this year, or Samsung could decide to eat into its profit margin. We really have no idea, and this post doesn’t have any sources cited to tell us where this info comes from. And we will never know if this info is accurate, as Samsung and other OEMs do not list out the cost of their parts, or BOM. Nothing’s CEO Carl Pei did talk about this in the past, but he was still very vague about the cost of individual parts.
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