It was going for $1,500 at the time, making it a particularly expensive thing to have bought as a conversation piece. The price was a serious flaw in Google's rollout strategy, perhaps more than anything else. They were trying to do a small alpha/beta, while also marketing the product as "cool" and exclusive at the same time.

The product was very very very MVP and alpha-like, but came at a finished-product price tag. I have to imagine that this strategy reaulted in a very small and non-representative test cohort of wealthy tech geeks in the Bay Area. Many of them no doubt purchased Glass as an in-crowd signal, with little serious intention of dogfooding the product or developing for it.

Hardware at that pricetag can't just be soft-launched like software. When you charge $1,500 for a device in basically v0.1, you're setting people up for disappointment.

It's reasonable and expected for early stage hardware to be much more expensive than a later mass produced piece; both on the cost side and on the demand side.

If you release a v0.1 bleeding edge device, your per-unit costs are huge, and you also target it at people who really need or want it's specific functionality, and thus aren't price sensitive.

For any class of such technology the price comes down only when the tech is tested and mass produced. If anything, they should have sold it at $3000 or $5000 to get more feedback from its use as a small alpha/beta in practical niche domains where it's really needed, not as a consumer device used as a fashion item instead of testing its practical application.