Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roughly speaking, from the beancounter perspective, selling one phone for $50 profit is better than selling two phones for $30 profit each, because you only need ongoing support for one customer.
That doesn’t hold up when you need someone to own your phone to sell them apps, a watch, AirPods, etc.
The person who spends money has money, so I expect the correlation between cheap phone and low store spending is fairly high. No idea about the whales though.