> knowingly gimp the hardware to upsell the more expensive versions.
I'm skeptical. A ton of money is dumped into optimizing everything and then they just throw it down the drain? That would drive more people to the competition than to higher-priced Macs.
I meant that bit in general and not specifically for the mac, but for eg they sold iPads with 32gb storage as recently as 2020 iirc. Even now the base level macs have much less ram and storage than similarly priced windows counterparts. I think part of it is just so they can say "macbooks start at $xx!". There are more examples I can't think of right now.
I'm skeptical. A ton of money is dumped into optimizing everything and then they just throw it down the drain? That would drive more people to the competition than to higher-priced Macs.