Since the entire point of licensing is to drive up quality, because there is a harm to incompetent practitioners in many areas, it feels to me like the study is intentionally constructed to be misleading.

For a business / professional targeted AR/VR that’s typical pricing, about the same as units from Microsoft and Quest. I agree it‘s not the consumer market pricing, where the $399 Quest 2 dominates.

Much lighter head unit improves wearability, which should help actual usage.

Generally makes sense to me. Waist battery pack isn’t elegant but cutting the head-unit’s weight in half is great for wearability. And it makes it easy to pick a huge extended life battery for some use cases, so people car wear AR all day. The only ‘bummer’ is the pricing, but $3k is typical for business-oriented AR/VR gear, so if just means it is targeted there, and at hardcore pro users, not home consumers. At least initially. Typical for Apple - focus on the high value, profitable market segments and let someone else try to run businesses with the money-losing lower value, lower priced segment. And over time Apple can drive down costs and expand down-market, or drive up perceived value, etc.

Running iOS apps in AR is brilliant - that gives them easy access to a huge App Library covering a wide range of use cases conveniently.