They kind of need some killer apps, killer features and killer (media) content. Someone made a demo watching F1 on Apple Vision with a 3D track map and floating timing page and whatnot. Something like this for multiple live sports. The device itself is quite impressive from a technology standpoint.

And yeah, the current pricing is way too expensive to be mass appealing. It’s likely very expensive to manufacture and of course you have to take development costs into account, but most people won’t spend $3,500 or more for “wow, this is impressive, but I don’t have a lot of use cases for it”.

Not sure how much they can save on manufacturing costs on a non-“Pro” model without losing too much of the experience though. Sure, they can omit the outer display and save on materials by using more plastic instead of aluminum, but other than that? They can use cheaper displays, but downgrade them too much and the user experience will be significantly worse. I also don’t see them using anything less capable than an M2. But even if they would use, say, an A15, it wouldn’t cost significantly less (15 vs 20 billion transistors). I don’t think they could get rid of the R1 chip either, as it seems to be quite important for processing sensor data and apparently a lot of it (it has 256 GB/s memory bandwidth for a reason), so I don’t think just the M2 (or even the M4) would provide a satisfactory experience.