Apple

I think that's been pretty obvious form the start. It was clearly priced at a premium upon being announced, and their initial production was cut from ~1mil units to just south of 400k. They know they won't have many buyers for this first gen product and are pricing/producing as such.

I think the whole point of having the headset priced in this range was to make sure that the experience really is very good. I'm sure thet they could've made this juuuust a little worse and therefore a bit cheaper (e.g., leave out the eye display to the outside, use one or two cameras less etc).

But then, everyone using it would probably be like "meh, this is nothing special, maybe AR isn't there yet" and abandon the idea. I think the first impression really matters here.

In the end, it's a feedback loop: If noone develops apps for this, there are no apps and nobody wants to use it. If nobody uses it, nobody wants to develop for it.

Agreed! I think there's also genuine uncertainty about what uses will be popular, much like the early Apple Watch iterations involved some amount of flailing to figure out what works.

The spare-no-expense approach can be seen as an effort to not close off avenues of exploration before they know what works. When optimizing for cost, decisions will be made to save money at the expense of ruling out some potential appeal, but right now nobody knows what will have appeal. The EyeSight feature seems like a prime example of something that very few would include in a product today because the appeal is uncertain while the cost is high. It might turn out to be a home run of a feature, and this luxury version of the Apple Vision product is how they can gain experience with it. If the response is instead that it looks like googly eyes, makes people uncomfortable, or doesn't achieve the goal of letting people use Vision while in the presence of others, then maybe it would find itself on the chopping block to get costs down.