The price tag is exactly why you can't "buy directly" as you say. It's not currently intended for consumers - they understand the price point makes that a non-starter. Given that the COGs aren't going down anytime soon, I'm in complete agreement with that choice.
On the flip side, if you've got an actual business case for hololens, acquiring them is rather trivial. And quite frankly for the use-cases I've seen hololens deployed, $3,500 a pair is barely a rounding error in the project budget.
It is slightly laughable to complain about Microsoft selling their AR glasses for €3500 when their direct competitor would (will?) be Apple, who have no qualms selling a €1000 aluminium stand or €50 000 desktop computer. Expect a solid premium over Microsoft's pricing.
> 28 cores and 1.5TB of RAM is still very much workstation territory
But its still a rather overpriced workstation. However, thats not the topic.
Microsoft also charges what the market will bare, but it is a completely different market. MS has been quite focused on their B2B products for a while, so selling the expensive Hololens to companies and not private users makes perfect sense.
So if you're in that group, its a solid investment
On the flip side, if you've got an actual business case for hololens, acquiring them is rather trivial. And quite frankly for the use-cases I've seen hololens deployed, $3,500 a pair is barely a rounding error in the project budget.