| Aside from possible technical explanations (e.g., the binning of products based on defects which permit sub-optimal performance as creato describes: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435397>), there's market segmentation. French polymath (economist, engineer, bureaucrat) Jules Dupuit famously described this concerning railway carriage accomodations and the parlous state of third-class carriages: It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity. Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich. <https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...> More on Dupuit: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Dupuit> Market segmentation by performance is a long-standing practice in the information technology world. IBM would degrade performance of its mainframes by ensuring that a certain fraction of CPU operations were no-ops (NOPs), meaning that for those clock cycles the system was not processing data. A service engineer would remove those limits on a higher lease fee (IBM leased rather than sold machines, ensuring a constant revenue stream). It's common practice in other areas to ship products with features installed but disabled and activated for only some paying customers. Another classic example: the difference between Microsoft Windows NT server and workstation was the restriction of two registry keys: We have found that NTS and NTW have identical kernels; in fact, NT is a single operating system with two modes. Only two registry settings are needed to switch between these two modes in NT 4.0, and only one setting in NT 3.51. This is extremely significant, and calls into question the related legal limitations and costly upgrades that currently face NTW users. <https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html> |