Why does PacBio's new sequencer cost $779000?

PacBio have just put out a press release announcing the Revio, the instrument cost $779000 and they say that consumable pricing with enable $1000 30x HiFi genomes. I suspect this doesn’t take instrument depreciation into account, which even running at full steam (1300 genomes a year) with a 5 year instrument life, is still >$100 per genome… but it still seems like a pretty solid offering.

This seems significantly cheaper than the current cost of a 30x human genome using nanopore sequencing, at least given average PromethION throughput in users hands. These are also HiFi reads, which means they are high accuracy (approaching Q30), and as such for a fair comparison you’d likely want to use higher coverage nanopore data.

But the instrument cost is…high. Why did they decide to price it at $779000? Are they following Illumina’s winning strategy of building bigger and more expensive instruments? In particular why would they do this when they’re competing with a platform that can be acquired for $1000?

To be clear, I don’t think the Revio needs to be this expensive. The instrument COGS here is likely significantly less than a NovaSeq. Almost all the clever sensing technology in PacBio’s instruments lies in the consumable itself… after the paywall break I’ll be trying to puzzle this out…