Apple said : "We are going to throw infinite money at a pilot product that's basically a tech demo, and convince the market that this tech is for-real-for-real."
Meanwhile, Facebook refused to create a balls-to-the-wall VR headset for years and still ended up with a conservative 1500$ device even though they knew no one will purchase it. T̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶f̶a̶i̶r̶,̶ ̶C̶a̶r̶m̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶u̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶-̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶i̶d̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶Z̶u̶c̶k̶'̶s̶ ̶p̶u̶s̶h̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶c̶a̶l̶e̶.̶ (I might have mis-remembered)
Apple's strategy is dead obvious. Of course. When you want people to change how they have consumed information for decades, you HAVE to blow their socks off. Samsung understood this with the 2000$ Fold devices. The first computers cost tens-of-thousands of 2023 dollars. Car manufacturers understand this with Halo cars.
Facebook had a 7-8 year head start, and it never struck them to lead with a 'Halo VR device' ? Meta has among the best ML teams in the world who could produce 'Apple quality' face renders with ease. Sadly, the entire group was strapped down due to limitations of the kind of compute you can fit into a 400$ device.
premature optimization is the root of all evil -Knuth
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What makes Apple great:
All big companies have competent employees. Competent employees come together in dysfunctional manners. 100 good ideas produce 1 terrible one and the final result looks worse than any of the initial solutions.
Apple somehow manages to preserve their obvious wisdoms & the brilliance of the best ideas across their development (product and software) process. The constant erosion caused by committees, meetings & standard communication friction does not atrophy the seed that was the initial idea.
It seems like faint praise. But, despite sounding easy, Apple seems to be the only company that's able to do this on a consistent basis with physical electronics. (video games, cars, construction projects achieve this in their field, but consumer electronics seems to completely lack this, barring Apple)