To clarify, since I think this is not obvious to the other commenters here.
(1) The company ships software updates that happens to be near the launch of a new model. It's not by accident, there are often major software changes to take advantage of the new hardware that is soon to be released.
(2) Users start complaining that they are seeing regressions: everything seems a bit more slow, or it's less reliable (things crash or freeze more often), other bugs requiring the device to be rebooted, etc.
(3) After the product launch, some of the users try the new model, and that runs very well compared to the older device with the degraded software (because the software was just optimized to it and extensively tested)
(4) Executives get reports about the user complains on older models.
Some internally wonder if better software practices or better QA would avoid such regressions on older devices.
Others quickly point out that doing so would be bad in two ways: it costs more; and it reduces revenue by removing an incentive for users to buy newer models.
(1) The company ships software updates that happens to be near the launch of a new model. It's not by accident, there are often major software changes to take advantage of the new hardware that is soon to be released.
(2) Users start complaining that they are seeing regressions: everything seems a bit more slow, or it's less reliable (things crash or freeze more often), other bugs requiring the device to be rebooted, etc.
(3) After the product launch, some of the users try the new model, and that runs very well compared to the older device with the degraded software (because the software was just optimized to it and extensively tested)
(4) Executives get reports about the user complains on older models. Some internally wonder if better software practices or better QA would avoid such regressions on older devices. Others quickly point out that doing so would be bad in two ways: it costs more; and it reduces revenue by removing an incentive for users to buy newer models.