Apple's newest tablet, the iPad Air, sells for anywhere between $499 and $929, and the iPad has been sold in this general price range for about as long as it has been around. A new teardown and cost analysis report by IHS iSuppli (reported by AllThingsD) estimates that the tablet only costs between $274 and $361 to build, delivering profit margins between 45 and 61 percent for Apple.

The tablet's 9.7-inch 2048×1536 display is the single costliest component of the tablet at about $133 ($90 for the display itself and $43 for the touch components). The cost has been driven up by the same changes that have allowed Apple to make the tablet thinner and lighter than the previous Retina iPad: fewer layers of glass are required to enable touch, and fewer LEDs are required to light the screen. iSuppli reports that 36 LEDs are used to light the new display rather than the 84 LED lights used in the earlier Retina iPads. Layers of optical film are used to dissipate the light from those LEDs, reducing the number of lights needed and enabling Apple to shrink the battery.

Other notable components include the A7 chip (estimated to cost about $18), the 1GB of RAM (about $10), and the NAND flash chips (anywhere from $9 to $60, depending on the capacity). Those NAND chips in particular are a huge profit driver since Apple charges $100 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB, another $100 to move from 32GB to 64GB, and yet another $100 to jump from 64GB to 128GB. Using iSuppli's numbers, this means Apple is charging about $300 for $60 of flash storage.

Finally, Apple is able to fit the hardware necessary to support every extant LTE frequency into one cellular-enabled model, cutting down on the number of hardware variations it has to manufacture—Apple no longer needs to build separate LTE-enabled iPads to support both AT&T and Verizon, for example. It can now make a single SKU and set it up to work with whatever carrier happens to be selling better.

While the hardware is theoretically capable of working on any carrier, some variants do appear to be locked down at least partially. GottaBeMobile has done some limited testing here, buying an AT&T iPad Air and inserting SIMs from Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint to see whether the tablet was truly unlocked. Putting a Verizon SIM into the AT&T Air worked fine, but a T-Mobile SIM kept trying to redirect to an activation page and a Sprint SIM prompted a "SIM Not Valid" error with the following message:

The SIM card that you currently have installed in this iPad is from a carrier that is not supported under the activation policy that is currently assigned by the Apple activation server. This is not a hardware issue with the iPad. Please insert another SIM card from a supported carrier or request that this iPad be unlocked by your carrier. Please contact Apple for more information.

It's worth noting that iSuppli does these cost analyses without Apple's input and that its estimates for component costs may not necessarily line up with what Apple is paying. iSuppli's numbers also typically only account for the costs of components and the cost of putting those components together, but not the costs of advertising, research and development, or shipping and selling the tablets. All of those will drive these margins down somewhat.

High profit margins are par for the course at Apple, which reported a gross margin of 37 percent in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 (and even-higher 40 percent margins in the same quarter a year ago). Apple relies on hardware sales for the overwhelming majority of its revenue and profits, and these cushy margins also help to subsidize the development of its steadily growing stable of free operating systems and applications. If you've ever wondered why Apple is so reluctant to drop prices even though there's clearly room to do it, that's probably your answer.