I would guess it has more to do with current and anticipated future availability than anything else. I don't work in hardware, but I've read some wild anecdote

I would guess it has more to do with current and anticipated future availability than anything else. I don't work in hardware, but I've read some wild anecdotes about the extreme difficulty of establishing a stable supply chain if you want to keep manufacturing exactly the same product for N years. I guess this won't be any surprise to the HN crowd, but often when you buy an X, it will have some different parts to the X (identical SKU) from last year and the year before.