Maybe I'll change my mind when I see people working or joining meetings in one of these but at least for now it looks like this is a product searching for a mass market.
On the contrary, this is the first time that non techies are actually interested in it and debating its implications on the society.
And about the price tag, a quick search tells me that %18 of the American individuals and %34 of the households are making over 100K and there are over 5 million millionaires and 770 billionaires in the USA.
Even if pricey, it is within the reach of so many people's income levels which means if it is good enough and people will buy it.
The price anchoring effects are strong but Apple is capable of creating its own anchors. Consider the iPhone, the iPhone 14 pro costs less than %25 of the monthly pay check of an average American and you say it's expensive. In the other extreme - Turkey, the iPhone 14 Pro costs about 5x the average salary(iPhone 14 pro is 2350$ today is less than 500usd) and people still buy it. It was never THIS bad, but even in the good times an iPhone would cost more than the average salary and everyone bought one and the Apple's market share is over %20.
Moral of the story, if you make something that people want badly they will find a way to get it.
Everybody is just grasping the "but it's Apple!" straw.
This was exactly the same when the iPhone was introduced. Only tech folks could tell it was actually really really useful. Other people were just like "So browsing the internet o a phone is better now. But why would I need to browse the internet one a phone?"
He's probably not going to make more money by having a bulkhead in the new personal computing paradigm (unless the ads are 10x as valuable, IDK). He's more importantly aiming to defend the current "proportion of attention spent on personal computing".
If other cos shift consumer attention to mediums where Meta has no presence or is excluded from, there goes his market cap.
"Implementation appears year ahead" does not mean anything. What matters is whether the product can gain enough attraction to be a successful business, which we don't know yet.
Back in the day Nokia, Siemens, Blackberry, Palm and Ericsson had smartphones that you could do everything that iPhone could do or even more.
These were devices that only those who have use it or those who are techno nerds used it.
When Apple introduced their implementation of smartphone, those who were using the devices from the established companies dismissed the iPhone as gimmick or inferior. Fast forward, the regular people queued for iPhones and the other smartphone makers are all gone.