I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s purely for DRM purposes.  In that sense, it&#x27;s a case of &quot;We&#x27;d like to price this physical item at two different price points, and control it in a soft fashion&quot;.<p>Playing devil&#x27;s advocate, I guess there are certain situations where you could justify this type of thing.  Let&#x27;s say that a product has an additional capability which 90% of the market doesn&#x27;t need, but required significant research to accomplish.  It&#x27;s a soft-capability, so there&#x27;s nothing additional that you need to manufacture to enable it.  You have a couple of options - you can make two different models (essentially identical underneath, except for the cheaper one disabling the extra capability), but this is inefficient.  You can of course have one product, one price.  But this is also less than perfect, as you have everyone paying for a feature 10% want, and you can be outcompeted at a cheaper price for the basic product.  Another option would be to DRM the product and soft-enable the feature for the 10% who want it, at a higher price.<p>I mean, it&#x27;s a bit of a stretch, but it&#x27;s plausible in some situations.