Nerfing hardware artificially can be beneficial to the consumer. I'm sure many things have a lot of their cost not in physical production, but in engineering/design. Software would be an extreme example of this. This being the case, nerfing allows different price points to be offered in order to more efficiently pay back engineering costs on the overall line. This is a win/win for the consumer and the seller compared to offering only one version of something.
I understand the market segmentation argument, but I fail to see how shipping a new generation of product, at a higher price than the previous generation, where the analogous model from the previous generation was unambiguously and objectively superior in specification, can possibly be benefitting anyone who buys the new, more expensive, inferior device.
