Steve Jobs' sinister plan for the iPhone 4 -

It is starting to look like Steve Jobs is banning left handed people from his walled garden of delights. The latest news is that Steve does not give a monkeys about the fact that people can't use the iPhone 4 in their left hand.

When quizzed about it by Apple fanboys he told them to use it in their right hands. It is fairly clear that Steve has a plan here which goes back to the middle ages.

In those days when the only way to stay warm was to burn heretics and witches, witchfinder generals hit on a wizard wheeze of deciding if someone was not towing the church line. The basis was that since the left hand was the hand of evil, then anyone who used the left hand instead of the right was in league with the devil.

This belief was quite common and as recently as the 1950s people were beaten in school for writing with the left hand. This is despite the fact that being left handed was as English as Queen Victoria. Other left handers who thought different included Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and Julius Caesar. Of course there are obviously evil people who are left handed. Jack the Ripper comes springing to mind, unlike Springheel Jack, but neither he nor Boston Strangler would use an iPad in a sinister way.

It is fairly clear that Steve wants to remove the world from the evil of being left handed and what better way than to train people using a nice shiny phone.

However there was something a little more sinister about Apple in the news today. Market research firm iSuppli claims that you could build your own iPhone 4 for just $187.51.

While it will hit the shelves for three times that figure, it looks like the beast is made up of really cheap gear. The most expensive part of the iPhone 4 is the 3.5-inch LCD screen which costs $28.50. The estimate doesn't include costs for items such as labour, shipping, advertising, software development, or patent licensing, but that is not going to be that expensive.

The price is based on a 16-gigabyte version of the iPhone 4. Apple used an internally designed A4 processor that was made by Samsung Electronics for $10.75.

iSuppli said Geneva-based STMicroelectronics supplied the gyroscope chip at an estimated cost of $2.60, as well as an accelerometer chip used in previous iPhone versions, which has an estimated cost of 65 cents.

In 2009, iSuppli estimated that the components and materials used in the iPhone 3GS cost about $179. The materials costs on that device have since dropped to $134.

The tame Apple press is ignoring what the price the iPhone would be if it was not heavily subsidised by AT&T in America. One site even claimed that it was amazing that Jobs Mob had managed to keep the price around the cost for making it. The last iPhone cost $180 to make and you could pick one up unlocked for about 600 euro. So we are talking about huge subsidies and huge profits for Apple.