Actually, while there may be a slightly higher profit per unit on the pure enthusiast side of the SSD consumer market, the lack of volume sales and higher back-end production costs means these high-end "consumer" SSD profits are far lower than mid-range high volume, but lower margins per unit sales profits.
I'm only posting what I've heard and seen from manufacturers. Usually (not always, of course) the enthusiast-level products are the biggest source of profit.
While you're right that R&D costs for high-end products are often higher, keep in mind that R&D is a fixed cost - the cost stays the same no matter how many units you sell. When you sell millions of units, the R&D cost per unit becomes rather small.
The attraction of designing a high-end product is that you actually get a mainstream product with very little extra R&D. Like in the case of Samsung SSDs, the same controller is used in the Pro and non-Pro. Basically, you spent a little more on R&D and got two products for two different markets. Had you cut down R&D, you would only have gotten a mainstream product but now you get both.
The actual production cost differences between mainstream and enthusiast products are rather small too. Each wafer has different qualities of NAND, which are separated by binning. By having low and high-end products, you can use the best chips in the high-end products where their performance and endurance may actually matter, whereas the lower quality chips can go in the mainstream model as they are still "good enough". Hence the production costs are pretty much the same - if you only had a mainstream product you would end up shoveling the high-end chips in there too, without actually taking advantage of their higher quality in terms of higher price.
If the mainstream market was more profitable, then everyone would stay there because why invest more when it's going to return less profit. OCZ and Nokia are great examples of this. OCZ prior strategy was to be in the mainstream market and compete in price. What happened was that they got into a big financial trouble because the margins were cut down to a state where they no longer covered expenses. They faced the laws of economics: When volumes go up, more players enter the market and prices (and profits) go down. With very little product differentiation, none of the players can grab a major market share and hence the volumes are also moderate (okay, uni entrance exams are making me crazy as all I see is economics everywhere, but it does apply here). In the high-end market, products can be differentiated more easily and buyers will also pay the premium for the differentiation.
Same happened to Nokia. They still sell dozens of millions of phones but most of them are low-profit feature phones. The real money is made in the smartphone business because margins are much, much higher.
Chances are with an OEM laptop,with an SSD, it will be an 830 or maybe a regular 840 if lucky or a similarly cheap Toshiba unit. It's "not" going to be a enthusiast high-end "Pro" model SSD.
SSD 830 is still available for B2B so that's what's found inside most. However, it wasn't cheap back in the day (before the sales started).
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