I've worked with PC laptop manufacturers before, and they do exactly the same thing. In every case, it's either "how can we take really cheap speakers with limited placement options and make them sound decent, to save costs", or "how can we take slightly better speakers and slightly better placement options and make them sound like surround sound so our audio can be a selling point".
It doesn't require malice or conspiracy to wind up with a closed proprietary design that makes up for cheap flawed hardware with software workarounds. It's the default if you don't have the opposite as an key value and make a deliberate effort to achieve it.
Yeah - the same thing has been happening for well over a decade with phone cameras. I bought a fancy full frame dslr camera recently and the image quality is incredible. But the sensor on my camera is 30x larger than my phone’s sensor (or something like that). And good lenses are massive - my arms get a workout from shooting.
It really puts into relief how weird it is that we get such good quality out of phone cameras. They’re almost as much generative AI images as they are actual photos.
It doesn't require malice or conspiracy to wind up with a closed proprietary design that makes up for cheap flawed hardware with software workarounds. It's the default if you don't have the opposite as an key value and make a deliberate effort to achieve it.