Baking the base models on to ROM makes a lot of economic sense.
Less so for consumers though, because it'd mean the phone is out of date in 3 months when a better model comes along.
It's a perfect reason to get consumers to buy a new phone every year again! They got bored of the camera.
I don’t think average user _needs_ to solve frontier challenges. ”Call to Jane”, ”turn on the lights” and ”what’s the weather this afternoon” is more like it I would guess.
Ofc if the model has some critical bugs that’s another matter.
And the customers can wait for the new phone released next year. These are edge models - the average customer doesn’t need the latest frontier model. Just needs to be good enough for the features you promised.
That's a software engineering problem. They just need to figure out how to fine-tune for alignment and tool usage.
That's the only thing the normie consumer cares for really.