alasta:jpoc: I believe that there is another factor in play here. If you buy the $300 DVD player, you might expect it to work for 5 years without problems and it will be feature packed. If you buy the $40 player, it will have fewer features and will die after 12 months so you buy another one for another $40 and you find that most of the features that were lacking on the one from last year have now made it onto the new one and your cheap DVD player has now cost you $80 (you had to buy two of them) and it is now not so far behind the $300 unit that you could have bought.
Another year, another $40 DVD player and your $120 now has you a unit that is actually an advance over the $300 unit.
You are forgetting the environmental impact of this, and the risk of the cheap machine potentially failing suddenly at an inconvenient time.
The environmental issues are real in squalid backward nations that dump those $40 DVD players in landfill but in modern nations, they are all collected up and put in containers to be shipped back to China. There the metal parts are recycled and the electronics parts are ground up so that the precious metals and rare earths can be extracted and then what is left is mixed up with milk powder.
In Europe, Aldi regularly has a specials on the current years crop of DVD players etc. People queue up outside the shop in the morning to be sure to get one. They have been doing that for well over a decade and there is no sign that their customers are reluctant to buy. In some classes of consumer electronics, Aldi is the largest retailer by volume despite only having each type of product in the shop for one week in the year.
It is clearly a model that has massive consumer appeal.