Not to mention, the vast, vast overwhelming majority of the architecture firms in the US are NOT on state of the art Pro hardware. We often keep an eye on what other firms in San Diego & around the country are using as we collaborate on projects. Nearly every firm in town operates on "if it ain't broke don't fix or upgrade it". Offices full of 2002-2005 celeron processor/xp home & pro machines running cad software from that year or even earlier. The construction trades are horribly slow at updating equipment. Nearly every consultant we talk to has to check when asked what version of acad they're using. Many are still on 2000 or some decade-old version of LT. ...whatever they were using when they got out of school. It could take a generational turnover, the retiring of the old farts, to see BIM fully replace vanilla acad. Most of the civil engineers in town still prefer table drafting, and don't know what to do with a .pdf unless it's printed and handed to them.
When Snow Leopard hit, I filled our architecture dept with base model 21" iMacs, running virtualized XPP installs. Even splitting the resources of those systems in half, they were the fastest computers anyone who came in ever saw run cad. The hardware is more than sufficient to run it with ease.
I thought Inventor would be much more of a resource sink, so I went nuts and tried out an 8 core mac pro with 16gb ram and 4 30" ACDisplays for the ID's and ME's to try out. It's smooth, but doesn't really do anything their 27" iMacs don't do, or do it noticeably faster. It's not like they sit around waiting for their iMacs to catch up like cheaper hdw in the old days. ...but then we don't do multipart assemblies in the tens of thousands of parts. ...just really, really, complex ones.
I'm just not sure the Mac Pro's are going to be as missed by Pros as suspected should they go.
