I really don’t think they intended for everyone to buy it. I think they wanted to get it out into devs and enthusiasts hands, and let people who are interested but not!willing to spend that much money demo it in an Apple Store. They gives time for apps to get tested, independent devs time to port their apps over and iron out any bugs, etc.
I feel like the fact that the first one didn’t move even 100k units but they’re still working on a second generation one that will cost less proves that. That’s kind of what everyone’s being saying about this ever since the price was first announced.
I’m running the beta of this right now. You still need NCP, because nowhere near all of the control panel options are actually in the new app. It’s just a handful of basic options.