Just about the same as the N900 by the looks of it, or any other high end phone. However, I don't disagree, Apple knows how to do this better than anyone else, but that is not the point. The iPhone is a luxury fashion toy for the upper middle classes around the world. Its marked share is what? 1-2 % or something.

You might as well compare a Porsche that cost 40 thousand to produce and is sold for 200 thousands, and a Toyota that cost 10 thousand to produce, and is sold for 15 thousand. Now, who makes must money? Toyota, there is no comparison, even though he profit margins at Porsche is sky high. You cannot simply isolate the margins from the total, it makes no sense.

But for the sake of the argument. Lets say the N8 in the US cost $500, should be about right, and the parts cost the same as the iPhone. The iPhone has a margin of $412 while the N8 has $312 The N8 only need to sell 30% more units to make the same total profit. However, the C7 and C6-01 and E7 use essentially the same HW except camera, and a few other details. The C6 sells for maybe $300 in the us, but the part cost is about the same, $188. The profit margin for the C6 is only $112. The C6 will outsell the others by orders of magnitude. This will enable Nokia to lower their production costs, of not only the C6, but the whole range. What Nokia has to pay is more in the order of $90 (relatively), maybe even less, for the core parts. Nokia has 40% market share. 40% of all GSM radios are used in a Nokia phone, Nokia dictate prices. On top of this, Nokia use the an Arm 11. This processor virtually cost nothing for Nokia, and by doing this, Nokia prevents the cost of more advanced processors to drop. They also use the Broadcom GPU, preventing the price of PVR GPUs to drop.

Nokia is king, it doesn't matter what we think. I bet Nokia could sell the N8 for $100 and still make lots of money, but substantially less than at $500. No other manufacturer can do this.