This question has a very clear and straight forward business reason - I feel like anyone paying attention to Apple over the years should notice the dynamic playing out here.
AR, rather than VR, is years away at any reasonable consumer price point. The AR style passthrough mode of something like Meta Quest 3 is still in largely unusable gimmicky territory. Getting over the hump into "good enough" territory is going to be expensive, and hard to scale.
The Vision Pro supposedly costs something like $2.2k to make, already past the point of reasonable or justifiable for most consumers. You can go one of two ways selling a device that expensive to make - take a loss (or just no profit), or add your profit margin on top. Selling at cost or at a loss is risky - if you can't start making it profitable in the short term, the market+boards+shareholders+your own internal politics will all start putting the pressure on to either fix it or retire it. Selling at a profit is risky - it takes an already unreasonable price point and puts it into ridiculous territory and might leave your product dead on arrival, with no buyers at all.
Apple has always been very disciplined about making money, whatever else you want to say about the company. They were never going to choose any other option besides "we want our full 35-40% profit margins, the same we get from our other devices". They've pushed their requirements the difficult-to-scale territory, so they only need to convince a tiny portion of the market to buy one. Like it or not, they have enough of a captive audience they'll almost certainly sell them. In short, they believe they're in a position to get away with selling a way overpriced device, and still make money from it - and that nobody else will be able to do so, giving them a headstart (not in terms of innovation, maybe, but in terms of locking down present and future profits).
In a year or two, competitors with a lot less to lose will test the boundaries of how much they can cheap out on this stuff and still ship a close enough approximation of the same features on sale here. Half of them probably will go for the sell-at-a-loss model, some may not survive, whilst Apple watches, learns, copies the lessons others are learning, and holds onto the coveted spot of being the only one making a profit on it.
I'm into the tech here and think it's cool - but whether the cost is "justified" or "worth it" is the wrong question. Is it a good strategy to maximise profitshare in this market, grab territory ahead of competitors, and further lock an ever-growing customer base into an ever-broadening and more expensive ecosystem? I mean, you know, it might actually be.
