How much higher though? If you were to take the total extra expenditure on increased salaries for those engineers, and divide by the number of phones produced, the result is what? A dollar?
Sure, but when applying Marketing Math™, remember that all prices need to end in "49" or "99" to "sound cheaper" than the next incremental bump. So you'll end up with a device that is either $50 or (more likely) $100 more than otherwise.
Or they'll eat that $1 from their profit margins…eh, who am I kidding?
If they're rounding to the nearest $50, they're doing it based on the final cost. They're not going to base it on a what-if scenario of having a cheaper development team. So it's more or less a 2% chance of the price going up $50.
