I never understood this. If you want the latest tech, you should be expected to pay your share of the the R&D/materials that went into creating it.
A big fraction of product cost is the overhead of setting up the manufacturing pipeline, so often the product tiers will be very small or even software changes to the exact same object.
This doesn't strike me as unfair. It's helped me recently, when I bought the lowest tier iPad pro (I don't care about storage or built-in cellular, and I want the smallest one). If someone wants to pay more for those things, let them. If it came full-price with all those features bundled, I simply wouldn't have bought it at all.
I realized what happened (they didn't explain in so many words) was that to be as efficient as possible, the difference between the mid level and base level trims was a different plastic faceplate with different labels, and a software switch. So mine apparently had the switch set for a different trim and all that was needed was to change it. But the exact same electronics were installed in all the cars.
Once I rented an Audi Q5 from Avis, fancy with leather seats and the touchscreen stereo and all that jazz... but the Nav didn’t work. I didn’t pay for the Nav addon, but the car comes standard with Nav. Looked for the Sd card, and it was there. I figured I’d spend some time after the client to figure out why... well before I even left, while I was putting my bags in the trunk I noticed a panel missing and a cable dangling. I plugged the cable back in, suddenly the car chimes and Nav appears on the stereo.
Don’t underestimate the lack of knowledge by people and the wolves who prey on them.
(Say the lowest tier widget costs $10 and sells 1000 units. The higher tier costs $20 and sells 100 units. The average revenue per unit is $10.91. The question then is, how many units would they sell if the single-tier unit price was $11?)
I do hate the idea of software unlocks, though.
It is not like the customer accidentally hit a button that burned up $4K of electricity; it is a digital enable code that could be just as easily disabled.
Even if they add some trivial service charge for reversing the transaction, or 1/1000 of the cost (because you had access to the fun feature for a day out of the 1000day expected lifetime), fine, but just stonewalling on an obviously reversible event is tantamount to dishonest dealing