I worked in Apple Retail through April of last year, and this was the specific policy advocated during training, with the argument that goodwill from being down sold outweighed the incremental profit. The canonical example was MacBook Pro -> air after getting into the customers needs, but extended to air -> ipad if the person had truly limited needs.
I honestly expected this to be basically a charade dropped during training, but throughout my time there, all of the interaction with managers revolved around the feedback score given by customers and no attention was paid at all to $/hour in sales.*
*somewhat frustratingly for me, since I sold a lot of computers and received no benefits for it.
As you say, it's anecdotal. But my wife's supervisor (an older lady) recently went to an Apple Store to purchase a Macbook. She came away with an iPad, extremely happy with the result and spending much less than she anticipated. Unlike her previous Windows laptop, she actually uses the iPad.
It makes financial sense to downgrade customers if you suspect they will use the product more / it suits their lifestyle better / makes them happy. This keeps them in the ecosystem and keeps them coming back.
My point being, they could easily make customers much happier for little effort. Say, by helping people root their own iPhones if they want to void warranty. But of course it's not in their business interest to do so.
Customer satisfaction may be at Apple's core, but producing the products that would make their customers the happiest is not.
I honestly expected this to be basically a charade dropped during training, but throughout my time there, all of the interaction with managers revolved around the feedback score given by customers and no attention was paid at all to $/hour in sales.*
*somewhat frustratingly for me, since I sold a lot of computers and received no benefits for it.