C'mon, people need to know better when reading stuff like this. There are R&D costs. Tooling costs. Multiply that by the number of scrapped early revisions. There's all kinds of costs that just don't show up when you get the luxury of adding up the finished parts with Digi-Key open in your browser.

I see a bunch of pretty complicated tight-tolerance plastic parts in there[1], not to mention the optics which need to fit pretty precisely. What did tooling cost for that alone? The article itself mentions that this isn't a simple injection-molded piece:

"The Glass display, for example, is only a few millimeters wide, but boasts quite high resolution and could have been tricky and expensive to design and manufacture."

[1] http://www.catwig.com/google-glass-teardown/teardown/glass-t...