When you look deep enough, nearly all 'tech' products costs are IP. For IP, it costs nothing to include a feature locked out. Even real hardware is usually l

When you look deep enough, nearly all 'tech' products costs are IP. For IP, it costs nothing to include a feature locked out. Even real hardware is usually like this. An expensive camera is probably only expensive because it had more R&D go into it and all of its components. The actual sand to make the silicon chips didn't cost any extra. Unfortunately, the way todays capitalist society works, it's pretty hard to say "I'd like to buy 1 million of your camera sensors please, and I'd like to have 200k of them be high performance and 800k be kinda noisy, but I'll let you know which are the high performance ones after I sell them". A really vertically integrated company like Apple could do it though - and they do, selling super high performance chips in cheap iPads, but software locked to not run a decent desktop OS - for that you have to buy a macbook with the same chip for triple the money.