This is more about big established companies. It's not really even technical; it's protecting their revenue, employee/management structures, etc. built around high-end from low end.

It would be interesting to find organizations which did historically build super high end stuff which moved down into consumer. Both successful and unsuccessful examples.

iRobot MIGHT be an example -- moved down from DARPA and Packbot to the Roomba; but they weren't really established, and those were different sectors.

Apple has sort of moved downmarket from computers (and, expensive ones) to cheaper ones to phones. But those were mostly adjacent sectors, not in their core product.

I'd love some counter examples where it was within the same product, an established company (say, 10+ years selling the old product), and moved in at the low end.