It has nothing to do with the "class of person" -- that whole notion seems pejorative in this context -- but maximizing how much you can extract in the aggregate.
In the case of Intel, for years (decades?) they were their own primary competitor. They wanted to be sure that for a given customer they could extract the maximum amount possible, and they did this by gating some features (ECC, AVX, etc) to try to avoid business customers deciding to get by on "lesser" processors. And the simple truth is that the overwhelming bulk of consumer products will never, ever have an ECC relevant error event, which is how businesses managed to get by without it.
Just about every company in the world that sells things (including AMD) engages in market segmentation.
A classic - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
It has nothing to do with the "class of person" -- that whole notion seems pejorative in this context -- but maximizing how much you can extract in the aggregate.
In the case of Intel, for years (decades?) they were their own primary competitor. They wanted to be sure that for a given customer they could extract the maximum amount possible, and they did this by gating some features (ECC, AVX, etc) to try to avoid business customers deciding to get by on "lesser" processors. And the simple truth is that the overwhelming bulk of consumer products will never, ever have an ECC relevant error event, which is how businesses managed to get by without it.