[tennysonmach]

They can define what "full Windows 10 computer" means. If Microsoft ported it, that $9 ARM based computer that showed up on kickstarter last year could be a "full Windows 10 computer".

They're trying to weed out early adopters to avoid dooming a product with known shortfalls that can be solved with product iteration and time (low FOV, tracking lag, etc).

Like what Google Glass is doing, except they seem to be making it less "glamorous" and possibly tethering it to a PC of some sort.

[WorldMaker]

Honestly, I think they've defined pretty well what "full Windows 10 computer" means in this case: You are strapping a full Xbox One with Kinect onto your head. Last I checked, you can't run a Kinect very well on a $9 ARM chip. Based on graphics we've seen in demos I doubt the system hardware is anything less than we see in an Xbox One, but it's definitely not less than what we see on a Surface Pro, form factor for form factor.

It's possible that they are trying to weed out early adopters with a high cost, but with entire new hardware that's not been mass produced to date (the holographic display, the proprietary holographic processing unit) it certainly seems like this is probably more a reflection of actual production costs today. It's certainly long been a tradition of console game systems that the early development machines are an order of magnitude (as much as even 100x, historically) more expensive than the final retail hardware. (Which also historically has been a profit center for some console generations when they were charging the same development box costs long after the retail cost margin drops.) It's very much a case that I think the only real comparison is to the Xbox One and we don't have a lot of data on that as Xbox One never sold dev kits to the public, that's certainly something new with the Developer Edition of the HoloLens.

Also, for what it's worth I've not heard any reports of "tracking lag" (in fact just the opposite from articles I've followed to date, that the HoloLens seems to have "tracking magic") and I'm willing to believe that the adjustments of the device's FOV are as much for safety reasons as anything else (we humans use our peripheral vision for a lot of things when navigating the real world). Certainly the same journalists complaining about the FOV have also stated that they've experienced different FOV in different demos.