"I think they absolutely will stick to the same design with the Touch," said Vronko, who expects Apple to update that iPod in September, traditionally the month Apple upgrades the line, or maybe even sooner.

Apple also bumped up the system memory in the iPhone 3G S, from the 128MB of the iPhone 3G to 256MB. "That means they really can consider doing some multitasking capability," said Vronko, talking about the background processing that the iPhone current lacks. The iPhone has been dinged since it debuted for its inability to run more than one application at a time. Apple, which has said it based its decision on power consumption issues, has bent a bit by adding what it calls "push notification" to the iPhone 3.0 software.

"I think it's more on the hardware side that Apple's decided to not do multitasking," said Vronko, "not the battery. I don't think running two applications [at the same time] would really make much of a difference in the battery life."

The rest of the iPhone 3G S is nearly identical to last year's iPhone 3G, Vronko noted. "The modules were in the same places and attached the same way, with a couple of exceptions, so it's clear that Apple is happy with the design," said Vronko.

That also means that Apple's profit margin is likely even higher on the new model, since it's probably already amortized the design costs. "The cost per unit is lower than it's ever been," said Vronko, who acknowledged that he hasn't yet done a cost-of-goods analysis of the parts uncovered by his tear-down. "But I'm convinced that Apple is making money hand over fist on these."