They'll get it down eventually.

But if you look seriously at the space, the price is aggressive for what it is. You're not getting a dumb display that's close for $2k. And the passthrough is insane and completely unmatched. There was a tiny bit of video noise, and it marginally removes your sense of the depth of the environment, but except for the fact that you have a display strapped to your face you could almost completely ignore that it's not the real world. Add the M2 chip and how powerful ARKit is and it's really a lot of tech for $3500.

$3500 is a lot. It's perfectly reasonable to wait, especially when it needs to be in developers' hands before the app ecosystem that really leverages what it can do really gets built out. But the "Apple tax" if they weren't sincerely trying to make it as affordable as possible (within their requirement of actually being good enough to constitute AR) is probably $5K plus.