That comparison doesn't work. There will always be people who are willing to pay whatever the price is for the best of something. We know that new big gpu's often start out with poor yields and high prices are mostly a result of low availability of usable chips. Once yields go up the same chip is used for other products with some parts fused off.
It does work similarly. Economies of scale work for any product in existence. The more of it that is produced, the lower the price it can be sold for. Even when you get down to commodity price levels it still exists. Almonds and pistacios are expensive, for example, because there is always going to be a relatively limited supply. They can only be grown in very specific growing conditions. Meanwhile peanuts are cheap because they can take advantage of far larger economies of scale due to high production capacity due to not needing very specific growing conditions.
Apple gets better pricing for custom components because they order such large quantities of them. In comparison competitors who can maybe only order a tenth or less of Apples volume is going to get much worse pricing for a custom component.
Right now, much of the Oculus Rift is going to be custom parts that are only being used for that device. Thus economies of scale are going to be absolutely horrible with horrible supplier pricing as a result. If Oculus Rift see's continuing demand and a suitable influx of money from orders they can then increase manufacturing capacity. Which means increasing the buy orders for custom parts. Which in turn means your economy of scale becomes better. Which in turn leads to lower pricing for those custom parts. Which in turn means cheaper manufacturing costs for the Oculus Rift.
Hence, while it is unintuitive to the average consumer, higher pricing at the start of a new product cycle is beneficial to everyone, not just the early adopters as it allows the company to increase manufacturing capacity which in turn drives down manufacturing costs which means they can sell a product for lower margins which means they can then drive down the price to more consumer friendly levels sooner. Without taking out so many loans as to put the company into immediate risk of bankruptcy if the demand isn't as large as forecast.
Yes, it's easy to hate on evil corporations. But if you want to target the "masses." You have to do one of two things.
1. Offer a quality product at a high price to early adopters. Offer the same quality product at a far lower price to the masses once that drives production increases and thus cost reductions. Experience will be good.
2. Offer a product of questionable or low quality. Cost to manufacture is low and thus can be manufactured in large quantities with less risk. Experience might be good or might be low or could potentially be horrible. And there will be far greater variability in the experience within the same product line. Just look at Rosewill's electronic products. They use low quality components. The experience is great, when the product works. But the experience is also low when the product stops working in 1-3 months due to the low quality components. It's always a gamble when you order one of their products but the price is so cheap that people often take that chance, sometimes to their great regret.
Oculus were likely hoping that they could make things work with a lower resolution screen. Once the device was out in more user hands they realized that was no longer possible.
Oculus were likely hoping that lower quality optics would provide a good enough experience. User feedback from the development devices indicated that users wanted something better. You can find many threads of users using things like garbage bags and shopping bags as cheap diffusers to attempt to make the early devices look better in an attempt to turn it into an acceptable experience.
Basically in the past few years since the Kickstarter was successfully funded, users of the device during the development cycle have indicated that their original vision for the Oculus Rift wasn't going to be good enough. Yes, it would have been cheaper and more mass market friendly (assuming you consider a PC that is 1000-2000 USD mass market friendly), but likely would have been just another VR failure due to all the deficiencies noted by users of the first 2 devices.
They could have also taken the risk of releasing the inferior original design which would have been able to hit a lower price point while working to release the far better version that is going to get released. The risk being that the experience of the original device would have been off-putting enough that consumers would not want to risk purchasing another Oculus device and would instead buy a competitor's device once better devices were released onto the market.
Regards,
SB
