There's another problem, a combination of their parts-ordering strategies and their infrequent updates. Macs these days are on an 8-10 month update cycle, which means that a lot of times there will be several months between updates to different product lines. It's happened before where Apple has been forced to decide between putting better stuff in their lower end machines and holding them back further to avoid doing just that.
It works better if I use an example. Early in 2004, the eMac was updated, with PowerMac updates still several months off. Apple gave the eMac an 8x Superdrive, faster than the 4x units they provided with the far more expensive PowerMacs. The only alternative would be to either wait on the eMac update (which they didn't want to do, it was clearly time for a refresh at that point), or leave the eMac with a 4x Superdrive, later upgrading it to an 8x in the next revision (which could be ten months or even a year later).
It's a dilemma Apple often faces when pro and consumer lines are staggered. They might give the best stuff available to the PowerBooks, but six months later the iBook is ready for an update and "the best of the best" from six months ago is now cheap and well suited to the iBook. But they don't want to make the iBook the same as the PowerBook so they put slightly below average stuff into it. Or they put the same stuff into it and then people stop buying PowerBooks because they're not a good value anymore.
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