The niche application part is a little bit made up by them. Small mixers and audio interfaces are a HUGE market, and a saturated market. By going high end (by milling a case, for example) they shrink their market, but also shrink their competition. The number of portable mixers / audio interfaces / synthesizers (it’s a synth too???) with super fancy cases… they might be the only one? The keith mcmillian k-mix is the only thing even similar I can think of and it’s not that similar (and $699)
Edit: someone in another comment pointed out the 1010 music bluebox, which is definitely more similar to this than the kmix, for $549
Edit 2: I just remembered the existence of zoom recorders. The zoom h6 has 6 tracks, is a portable mixer and audio interface, and also includes 2 good microphones and can record without being tethered to another device. It’s about $400. It’s got a different vibe, but it’s also quite beautiful
Prosumer audio gadgets are a relatively small market, audio interfaces are a slice of that. Audio interfaces that function as mixers are even smaller.
There's been a boon with stream decks the last few years, but the only part of that market that's saturated is the low end. There really are not that many high quality mixers and audio interfaces out there, and they are not really in a small form factor like this.
Not to mention the codec shortage. Making a digital audio board right now sucks.
I think you might be underestimating the size of the market for audio interfaces and mixers - but that’s just a feeling mostly based on how many of them are on craigslist at any given moment in my city.
But either way you can’t deny they’re choosing to go high end. They could have scaled down the software features of this by 10-20%, put it in a less “jony ive” case and sold it for $300-600 - but then they would’ve had more competition.
The TAM for pro audio equipment was around $10 billion and growing when I left working in it a few years ago. One of the reasons the market is so terrible for manufacturers is that their own products on the secondary market cannibalize future sales, which puts a damper on demand. It's great for professionals that can afford the high prices and buy stuff that last decades, but not great for an industry that needs to make new sales each year and develop future products. There's always cool stuff to build and develop, don't get me wrong, it's just not worth a ton of money which means that development times are long, prices stay pretty high for the good stuff, and talent is constantly siphoned by other markets (for example: consumer loudspeakers and AR/VR products: Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon have been on hiring sprees for audio hardware/software developers for the last decade)
Over the last decade there was a growth in new products, but there's a lot of crap. There was also a lot of consolidation and acquisition because audio hardware manufacturing is such an expensive thing to do for a small market, particularly on the high end.
Expensive expensive expensive! That case looks like it was milled!