Comment by viscanti

Not that weird of a spot. That's what it costs for the most premium experience they can launch with. They'd rather it be good than something everyone buys on day one. They can get costs down in future models as they scale and progress pushes down some of the costs. As iPhones become even more performant in the future they can also eventually offer a version that offloads more compute to that and bring costs down even more. Their goal is to show this is a new type of product that works at the level people expect for a completely new Apple product. They can probably afford to wait for a much lower priced mass consumer product.