Medicinal marijuana needs to be consistent and prescribable by the dose. This is the kind of tech doctors need to be able to treat patients for specific ailments on a consistent basis. It is not designed to be cheap or recreational. I don't even know where a recreational user would get the pods. But this is the direction the medical industry is going in and it makes sense for them.
What you say makes sense, but are these pods going to be available in an array of 1mg dose increments, or what? I agree with you in principle that controlled dosing is valuable to patients, but I don't think disposable cups that cost many times over what loose flower does and generate loads of trash is a useful solution for anyone except the medical industry. Preloaded cups will only force specific dose increments.
Further, I believe the pricing puts the cart before the horse! Anything designed for medical users
should be cheaper than recreational products. At $6-7 a pod, assuming a pod is a single dose, that's significantly more than most recreational users would pay for a single use*, much less what you'd pay at tax-reduced medical prices. $150 is actually quite reasonable for a quality vaporizer unit, so that's not particularly overpriced, but the pricing model appears to be meant to gouge long-term users.
I couldn't find anything on the company website about where this will be marketed, or what the contents of the pods will actually be. It doesn't appear they've even gotten that far, so who knows how this price was floated.
*Just some rough estimates: many users here state use of 0.1g or less per dose, and
this study finds that 0.32g is the average size of a joint, with all the implications that come with it being a joint. At $15/g, what you'd pay for small quantities of top shelf recreational cannabis in Colorado (it can be as low as $10/g if you buy in quantity, again rec prices), this implies $1.50 for a .1g session or $5 for spliff quantities, both less than what this suggests is the price of a single pod. Again, with no info on where this figure comes from, the quantity in the cups, or where this is planned to be marketed (is there a state with truly insane medical prices that they plan to sell this in?), I have a hard time judging, but this is where I base my comparison.