You know, I often wonder about that. Do they lose money on their base 70MHz models, and they expecting most people upgrade to at least a break even level, or are the base models profitable, and every license key you buy above that is just pure profit gravy?
In terms of actual hardware manufacturing cost, I highly doubt they'd be selling anything at a loss ( that may even be illegal in some jurisdictions) , but they will be relying heavily on sales of higher models & options to recoup development cost, and quite a bit of that cost (particularly software, maybe also the 10 bit ADC) will be shared (maybe already recouped) over different product ranges.
As long as they are competitive in features vs. cost to the competition, people that want a 300MHz scope will buy ( or upgrade) to that spec - some people need that spec, so they just have to make sure they buy theirs and not the competition, and they do have potential to add sweeteners like options at no coat to them if they think that would make a sale they otherwise wouldn't have got.
And longer term they can adjust prices if the balance of models is different to what they based their pricing on.
Something that I have always wondered out of random curiosity- scopes are a relatively niche product. The avarage person on the street wouldn't even know what one was. There are so many options from so many manufacturers, especially at the low end (<=100Mhz).
Keysight are giving away something like 150 scopes, (including I think 10+ pretty high end ones) this month.
Just how many scopes at the various levels are sold worldwide each year - anyone know ?