Inside, the phone is similar too, but there have been some strategic changes from one generation to the next that have important implications for Apple’s many suppliers. According to a teardown analysis conducted by the research firm IHS iSuppli, chipmaker Intel, which last year acquired the wireless operations of the German chip concern Infineon, has been almost entirely bounced out of the 4S in favor of a set of chips from Qualcomm. The shift to Qualcomm had been rumored as far back as last September.

Before Intel acquired its wireless unit, Infineon had previously supplied Apple with a chip known as a baseband processor that Apple had used in combination with chips from Skyworks and Triquint to work with wireless phone networks. “Qualcomm is the big winner here,” says Andrew Rassweiler, an analyst with IHS iSuppli who conducted the teardown. “It is selling Apple a whole suite of chips that adds up to about $14 to $15 per iPhone.”

Intel spent $1.4 billion to acquire Infineon’s wireless chip operations last year in a move seen as meant to shore up its presence in the wireless phone industry overall. It has struggled to win business for its Atom line of microprocessors, which are aimed at mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Infineon still has a small chip in the iPhone, but Rassweiler says it’s far less significant and a lot less costly than the one it supplied Apple before. “It’s almost like Apple threw them a bone with a 50-cent part after they lost a much more high profile chip that cost about $10,” he says. Intel had no comment.

ISuppli regularly conducts teardown studies of wireless phones and other consumer electronics devices in order to find out who a manufacturer’s vendors are — like most manufacturers, Apple prevents its suppliers from identifying themselves, much as they’d love to — but also to determine what each part costs. The combined cost of components — analysts check on the list prices of each part — is known as a bill-of-materials (BOM) estimate that gives a fair idea how much a manufacturer, in this case Apple, makes in gross margin on each device sold. Apple doesn’t disclose its gross margin on a per-product basis but when it reported its quarterly results yesterday it said its overall gross margin was 40.3 percent.

In the case of the iPhone 4S, Rassweiler estimates that the BOM cost ranges from $188 for the 16 gigabyte version of the iPhone 4S to $207 for the 32GB version and $245 for the 64GB version. Apple and its carrier partners sell the phones for $199, $299 and $399 respectively, typically with a two-year contract for wireless service that carriers use to subsidize the cost they pay Apple.

The costliest components are the ones that determine the price: Memory chips. Apple has been known in the past to rely mostly upon South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest supplier of memory, and from Japan’s Toshiba. In the phone that Rassweiler’s team tore down, the memory chips came from Samsung rival Hynix Semiconductor. “That struck us as a bit of a surprise,” Rassweiler says. It’s hard not to wonder if adding Hynix to the stable of iPhone memory suppliers is a partial response by Apple to the complicated patent fight it is waging with Samsung in courtrooms around the world.

Even so, Samsung appears to be have maintained its role as the manufacturer of the Apple-designed A5 processor that provides the iPhone 4S, and also the iPad 2, with most of its computing horsepower. Some published reports in recent months had suggested that because of the patent fight, Apple might end a relationship that dates back to the original iPhone and move its chip manufacturing contract to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the huge chip manufacturing foundry. Rassweiler says there’s no sign on the latest A5 chips that that has occurred. “The markings are the same as what we saw in the iPad 2,” he says. The estimated cost for the A5 chip is $15 each, he says.

Apple started designing its own chips for the iPhone and iPad products beginning in 2010 with the release of the first iPad. The chip is thought to have been designed by teams from PA Semi and Intrinsity, two privately held chip design firms that Apple acquired in 2008 and 2010 respectively.

However, it’s also clear that the A5 chip is taking on more of the heavy computing lifting inside the device than the previous A4 chip, Rassweiler says. For example: The iPhone 4 contains a chip from privately held Audience Semiconductor, based in Mountain View, Calif., that handled noise cancellation. There’s no such chip inside the iPhone 4S, Rassweiler says, so it appears that noise-cancellation duties may have been moved to the beefier A5 chip itself.

Triquint Semiconductor provided a set of chips that make up a wireless transmit module that works with the wireless phone networks. Triquint has traditionally been an iPhone supplier, Rassweiler says, but the value of what it supplies to Apple appears to have dropped. One wireless chip company that has seen the value of what it supplies to Apple increase is Avago Technologies. Like Triquint, it too has been an iPhone supplier, but the overall value of the chips it supplies has gone up in the 4S.

STMicroelectronics, the European chipmaker, maintained its role as the supplier of gyroscope chips that help determine the phone’s position and rotate the screen for playing games and displaying pictures and videos. AKM Semiconductor again supplied the compass chip. Texas Instruments continued in its role supplying the chip that controls the iPhone’s display, and an audio chip.

One vendor could not be identified. Rassweiler says that Apple appears to have taken pains to hide the identity of the company that supplies the parts that power the iPhone 4S’s highly regarded 8 megapixel camera. This is not new, and the candidates include Largan Precision Co., a Taiwanese supplier of camera modules to wireless phone companies, and Omnivision. “We don’t know exactly who makes it,” Rassweiler told me. Whoever the supplier is, Rassweiler estimates the camera added $17.60 to the cost to build the iPhone. And they’re likely to make a lot on the deal. IHS iSuppli is forecasting that Apple will sell 81 million iPhone 4Ss around the world next year.

Update: A few of you have written in saying that it was Sony who supplied the camera. Maybe. The folks at Chipworks dissected the camera module and found a Sony-made CMOS image sensor inside it. That doesn’t make the whole module a Sony’s however. It could be a Sony camera or it could be that whoever made the camera used a Sony sensor. And last week Barron’s reported on some debate among analysts over whether or not Apple has split the camera supply contract 50-50 between Omnivision and Sony.

Moving on now to the Q&A with Google (GOOG) enterprise head Dave Girouard:

• Q: How much revenue flows through this (Apps)?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’re going to get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft (MSFT) and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel Group rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “‘don’t be evil’ is one of Google’s core values. “We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech (DNA) rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that. We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.

Moving on now to the Q&A with Google (GOOG) enterprise head Dave Girouard:

• Q: How much revenue flows through this (Apps)?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’re going to get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft (MSFT) and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel Group rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “‘don’t be evil’ is one of Google’s core values. “We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech (DNA) rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that. We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps, just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.

Pretty slick. Google (GOOG) has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps. Seamless integration. Works offline. Same familiar Outlook experience. Use Gmail and outlook simultaneously. Everything is supported natively and, as the demoer notes, “your data is safe, it’s with Google.” Well, that’s one way to look at it.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook is available today as part of the company’s Premiere Apps. It’s available for Windows only.

A few quick case studies: Avago rep says this represents the “last hurdle” for users to get over migrating away form Exchange. The feedback we’ve gotten is that this looks “exactly the same” as Exchange. Genentech (DNA) rep relates a similar experience. “It looks like a native Outlook experience. The average has no idea we switched out the back-end…We anticipate widepsread adoption.”

Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division: “I bet you never imagined you’d see Google demonstrating Outlook for you all, so this is a first.”

At an event in San Francisco, Google is expected to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft (MSFT) Office, something the company desperately needs to do if it wants to make deeper inroads in the enterprise area.

As Girouard himself admitted last week, Apps still has a ways to go. “Gmail is really the best email application in the world for consumers or business users, and we can prove that very well,” he said. “Calendar is also very good, and probably almost at the level of Gmail. But the word processing, spreadsheets and other products are much less mature. They’re a couple of years old at the most, and we still have a lot of work to do.”

In a few hours we’ll learn just how much work has been done and how much is left. Join us for live coverage beginning at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT).

• The title of this morning’s presentation is “Google Apps: The Enterprise Cloud.” Presiding over it, Andrew Kovaks from Google’s cloud computing team and Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division. According to the schedule provided, it will feature a CIO roundtable discussion as well as some new product demos.
• Girouard kicks things off with a quick overview of the business. Google is a 10-and-a-half-year-old company, he says, adding that Google Apps is about half as old as that. “We’re about five, five-and-a-half years into this initiative.”
• Girouard says the current recession has made cloud computing more urgent, more necessary. “This has been a really difficult environment. Everyone is feeling it and we need to respond…It’s important to invest in difficult times, especially during times when everything is telling you to cut back.” Great companies thrive during downturns, he notes, adding that Google is investing in Apps, because the company views it as an area the company can grow into for quite some time to come.
• Looking backwords for a moment, Girouard notes that this particular side of Google’s business was born out the company’s search app and then Gmail. Gmail, he adds, was initially conceived as an internal app before it was rolled out to the consumer market.
• A few interesting data points:

  –70 percent of the universities in the U.S. are in the process of outsourcing or moving their email to a cloud computing solution.

  –Google now has 1.75 million businesses on Google Apps.

  –It has more than 15 million active ursers.

  –Dozens of Apps customers with more than 1,000 employees.

• Increasingly, larger companies are moving to Google Apps. Among them, Genentech (DNA), the first large business to “go Google.” A Genentech rep is on hand to talk up the company’s experience which, obviously, was a positive one.

  Also, a recent advocate of Google Apps, Avago–the first company with over $1.5 billion in revenue to use Google Apps as a suite. “We save over $1.6 million a year using Google Apps,” says the Avago rep.

  Another recent Google App convert, Morgans Hotel Group, the proprietor of the Clift Hotel, at which this event is being held. The Clift rep says the platform has had a tremendous impact on the company already and it’s only just made the switch.

• So, why are companies adopting Google Apps? A few reasons: Radically lower costs, obviously. But also a steady stream of innovation. We haven’t exactly seen that from Google yet as I noted in the introduction, but presumably there will be some evidence of it on display later this morning.

  To be fair, Google did make a few additions to Apps last year–APIs and whatnot. Girouard offers Gmail offline and Secure Data Connector as examples of this. The company has made other smaller enhancements as well, such as extensibility features and enterprise Interoperability features.

• Interesting. Girouard says Google Apps often provides a 3X cost savings over other non-cloud solutions. He also says Google believes it has a more reliable product than most. The company is holding itself to that claim by being more transparent about downtime and service incidents. He notes the Apps Status Dashboard, which tracks up and downtime, as a move in this direction.
• “Failure is not an option,” says Girouard. His mandate to his team: There can be no failed deployments. Enterprise deployment and support must be streamlined and easy.
• All this is wonderful, but what’s the company got that is new today? Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.

  Google has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps. Seemless integration. Works offline. Same familiar Outlook experience. Use Gmail and outlook simultaneously. Everything is supported natively and, as the demoer notes, “your data is safe, it’s with Google.” Well, that’s one way to look at it.

  Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is available today as part of the company’s Premiere Apps. It’s available for Windows only and it is an enterprise-only service. It is, however, available for free to non-profits and educational institutions.

• A few quick case studies: Avago rep says this represents the “last hurdle” for users to get over migrating away form Exchange. The feedback we’ve gotten is that this looks “exactly the same” as Exchange. Genentech rep relates a similar experience. “It looks like a native Outlook experience. The average has no idea we switched out the back-end…We anticipate widepsread adoption.”
• Girouard: “I bet you never imagined you’d see Google demonstrating Outlook for you all, so this is a first.”
• Moving on now to the Q&A:
• Question: How much revenue flows through this?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’ll get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “Don’t be evil is one of Google’s core values…We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that…We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.