The early adopters pay for the research and development of a new technology... anyone that has to have the latest and greatest new gadget is going to pay the "first guy" tax. Quite often second generation is good enough.

The most classic recent very public example of this was the iphone... where folks were paying upwards of $500 to get in "on the ground floor," and then Apple cut the price within months. Ouch.

Do you really need the latest color radar/chartplotter with backscratcher? Perhaps last year's deeply discounted model would suit just fine.