Well...here is how it happened when I used to work in the electronics field....
When the product goes out the door after launch, the design still goes on. The difference is that the engineering is not really done by R&D anymore. It's by a sustainable engineering group or something similiar. Whatever the names is, you get the point. What this engineering group does is take the existing design and make it better/cheaper or they fix things that consumers complain about. It could be something as simple as getting the same capacitor from a different vendor but at half the price or something as big as changing a circuit board design to a cheaper solution (because of cheaper parts or even because the intial design was flawed or not as good). In the speaker industry, it could be changing the driver that goes in the actual speaker. In the end, it could be inferior or superior. Only the people who designed the thing know. Most of the time, it is just as good in one prospective, but worse off in another. In the end, it does not really matter because the whole point is to make a design that does the same thing in the end.
With the case of a TV and Walmart, yeah, Walmart COULD get a cheaper version, but it is not up to Sony or whatever manufacture. Yes, Walmart does have buying power to make companies make cheaper solutions....but they do not have teh buying power to make a whole new line of crappy tvs with just poor parts. It would cost a company too much to do that (it would involve re-engineering on the r&d side). You have to remember this also....lots of this stuff is built by subcontracts...much like how dell underpriced everyone years ago. This is how these TVs are built now. They make specs and firms design them and submit them. Sony buys them and puts them together to make one product. The cheaper one obvioulsy wins most of the time. This is done whether or not the stuff goes to walmart or some high end snob shop.
How does this relate to walmart and cheaper prices? Well...if there is a new iteration of the TV, the Sony would want to get rid of the older version. There is two choices...sell all their old stuff to a cheaper outfit who would simply rebrand it or sell to walmart because they would be only the only company who have enough buying power to resell all that merchnadise without putting it on the 75% clearance rack.
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