I wonder what the BOM cost of the device is. At $500 they'd sell 100x as many. Hell, even at $999 they'd sell quite a lot of them. I'd probably give it a try for that price, but I'm hesitant to blow $3500.
2x iPad Pro 11 inch cost 2x$800 = $1600 - and they also have big profit margin on those. A lot of tech and sensors are similar if not the same, like: Lidar, TrueDepth, Cameras, IMU, wifi, bluetooth, M2 chip. The only obvious thing not available in iPad Pro is much smaller and higher quality screen.
Hopefully they can reduce price to $1500 in next few generations and increase functionality:
- macOS support (We can only probably dream about it)
- usb-c / hdmi out so this can replace desktop iMac when connected to external monitor (still probably unlikely)
- 3rd party access to cameras stream if given permission - hard to make any innovation with this hardware if you cannot even detect QRCodes because Apple doesn't provide any API and you don't have access to camera feed.
