Take apart the phone and look at individual parts and you will find that this is absolutely the case. Every large scale electronics manufacturer uses this strategy.
And specifically in Apple's case they do spend more money doing stuff like soldering ram to the motherboard so customers can't upgrade them.
100%. Soldering RAM makes the engineering quite a lot easier, prevents a RAM module vendor from making profit, and gets rid of an entire assembly step because now you no longer need to install the RAM module.
The downside is a lack of flexibility, because you are now committed to a very specific RAM chip and you need to spend effort if you ever need to change that - rather than just plugging in one of a dozen modules.
And plenty of people buying those processors feel it's their right to 'overclock' to get the performance of a more expensive product - In the early 2000s people would even bridge connections on the chips with pencil to reverse multiplier locking.
Slot 1 300A Celeron pencil trick was the best. I lived with that for a while, and then I got a dual socket 370 533 Celerons on the BP6. That was an absolutely insanely overpowered machine for years.
their options are to:
* do novel research into making a sku that produces exactly $199 worth of sound quality, no more no less (more expensive)
* sell everything cheaper, which is equivalent to making both skus sound identical (less profit)
* not make a low end sku (pricing out potential customers)
* create a low end sku for lower binned drivers (least bad option)
They’ve added more material (and cost) with the foam, and to make the product worse.
A cheaper iPhone isn’t usually a crippled high end model.