Apple has released dev kits before. Most recently the apple silicon devkits. Those have pretty much universally been explicit and have come with a requirement to return the devkits once consumer hardware capable of being development hardware is released.
They were hoping for consumer (or industry) acceptance. They visibly did not get that.
It doesn’t even support IMAP email credential payloads in provisioning profiles. This is some of the bare minimum required for enterprise use. I haven’t tried to MDM one yet. I don’t even know how you’d supervise one without a port to connect it to AC2.
It’s quite clearly not designed for mainstream use without enterprise features or a consumer price point.
Remember also that hardware pipelines are 2-3 years long. They almost certainly are well into the design of the consumer model that will come out in 18-24 months. By that time, there will be many apps available for them because of the AVP1 being in the hands of tens of thousands of developers for 12+ months.
Except all of their previous developer kits have been about the same cost as the consumer version.
Intel DTK - $999
Apple Silicon DTK - $500
iPhone - No DTK, just released without third party native apps at all.
That combined with how Apple regularly whiffs enterprise support and the fact that it sits right in the middle of their current display prices looks very much like they intended it to be a true consumer/industry release.
Well, with a working simulator and hundreds of thousands of them in the wild, I imagine it is possible to develop for one and test on one without actually buying one of your own.
Then ship it opened up, but perhaps more unpolished, to devs. Right now I think it's lack of success is that it's inbetween both. It's useless as a dev kit, too polished and locked down. Useless as a consumer unit when no one makes things for it.
While Oculus didn't take off, the DK1 had a massive hype and a large community building stuff.
