To your last point, you’re confusing the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone. The original iPhone was the one that had a price drop after launch which included the apology response, not the iPhone 3G.
To the rest of your point, I’m sure Apple is aware that there aren’t a lot of customers at the 3500 dollar mark. They’ve said as much in interviews, but you’d have to attribute a lot of hubris to them to think they thought they’d steal market share from the Quest line.
Again, all reports say they can’t even manufacture enough right now to be more than a blip on the sales chart.
Perhaps your first paragraph bellies your confusion because you claim it’s just a consumption device, and partly that’s because apples marketing focuses on it, because it’s the easiest thing to communicate.
The 3500 price tag is exactly the starting price point of other high end XR headsets that are used in many non-consumption areas. I say starting, because they go up considerably from there (see the Varjo XR prices). That’s the space where it’s not consumption, but work. It’s the same way that a Mac Pro can be used to view Netflix the same way a MacBook Air can, and they have similar capabilities on paper but widely different markets to target.
From all accounts of working with those industries, Apple has eaten that market share. Varjo has stopped being the headset of choice for most of those cases, to the point that even NVIDIA (who were a huge Varjo customer) are doing Vision Pro courses at siggraph and made it the headset they feature for professional work ( https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-awe-2024/omniverse-apple-... )
Basically, don’t take Apple’s consumer facing marketing as their entire sales pitch. They have completely separate paths for businesses.
None of this is to say that there aren’t areas that Apple has missed on with the headset. There clearly are several, but I don’t think sales strategy is actually one of them. Marketing is perhaps an issue though.