It certainly feels ethically questionable from a certain perspective. But we can look at it in a specific way. We want pricing to be fair. A typical customer's

It certainly feels ethically questionable from a certain perspective. But we can look at it in a specific way. We want pricing to be fair. A typical customer's perspective of a fair price is that is should approximate the unit cost of production plus the up front development cost of a product amortized over units. In this view fairness, if a family of widgets all have the same hardware, and use the same based software to enable or disable different features, they should all have the same price. However, there's another view of fairness (or maybe just a desirable feature of the markey). It should be possible for a customer to purchase only the features required to meet their requirements, and that they should be able to spend less money on less features. Those two views of fairness can be in contradiction with each other. The ability of a company to be able to provide a family of products at a variety of feature and price points cheaply is aided by their ability to do software based control of features. Use of a single physical platform reduces cost (which aids the final customer). If a company had to price everything at a single feature/price point, the average customer will see an increase in price to pay for features they do not want. Anyhow, that's the argument. Still feels icky though.