and who claimed that? there is however a moral obligation to not lie to your customers.
if anything, the crippled version is actually more costly to produce, since some R&D went into making it crippled.
I do, however, find it ironic that the $199 555 model physically contains more "parts" and more manufacturing costs than the $349 595 model.
Curious if anyone has thought about the correlation between shareware/trialware software and these headphones, being that HN readers are generally more software than hardware people. I mean, the only difference between my 30 day trial of Something.app and the unlimited version is a 32 character string, and depending on my current morality level, I could find any number of those strings floating around the internet.
That's true, but imagine what they could do differently. They could have a whole separate assembly line to make the cheaper headphones out of different material, for example. But ironically, this might actually drive up the cost of both headphones, since they'd lose the economies of scale that they have now.
I agree that it seems wrong to intentionally make your headphones worse, but it might be the most cost-effective way of producing a cheaper set, given that you're already making the expensive model.
When I buy headphones I expect more than a license to use technology.
Why do you believe that? A company has no moral obligations to its customers in any way.
However everything we humans do has moral implications, and company that lies is clearly behaving in immoral way. Then it's up to a customer to decide based on her morals what is the right approach to dealing with such company.