I disagree on the new Mac Pro not being a professional machine; I was initially skeptical but I've warmed to the idea in a big way. In fact I think Apple has created something pretty clever here, though I do wish they'd kept it a little bigger so there was room for a second processor and/or at least one SATA drive.
Even so; most professionals will be using fairly big RAID arrays anyway, which means an enclosure on the desk. It's going to suck for people with existing internal RAID cards with external connectors to switch to Thunderbolt, but I do think Thunderbolt is the better overall standard.
For those of us that don't have quite the same RAID requirements, a decent USB 3 enclosure isn't particularly expensive, and can handle four HDDs in RAID-0 without much trouble.
A lot of people have lamented the presence of enclosures on a desk, but if you think about the current Mac Pro isn't something that most people have on top of a desk (the thing is
huge), so most people can easily put their enclosures under their desk where the old Pro would go, meanwhile the new one can easily take pride of place on top of the desk.
The move to two GPUs as standard is perfect for video editing, and if we see more professional apps leveraging them could be a huge boon for other applications as well.
My main concerns are:
- Only having internal Flash storage. The speed of it sounds great, and it should make a sweet Fusion drive when combined with an external RAID-0 array over USB 3 or Thunderbolt 2. However Core Storage lacks any provision for disconnecting an SSD/Flash device from a storage pool cleanly, which means upgrading to a future Mac Pro could be a massive pain, rather than a nice simple swap which external devices would otherwise make possible. I did used to have my SSD and RAID-0 as separate volumes, but after trying them as a Fusion Drive instead I never want to go back to manual volume management!
[*]Cost. Having no dual CPU arrangement means a big cost from the high-end model is eliminated, but twin GPUs potentially means that all Mac Pro models are going to be more expensive. I assume Apple will be getting a great deal on the cards, hopefully eliminating the bulk of the premium price that professional GPUs provide, but even so I can't see it being cheap. Most of the components the new design eliminates weren't that expensive, same goes for materials cost for the case itself, reduced fans; these savings add up but I doubt it'll be enough compared to an extra GPU and Flash storage as standard, plus the cost of smaller components (power supply etc.).
I dunno; my 2008 Mac Pro doesn't seem to be very healthy lately, and I'd love to upgrade. I already have a heap of HDDs inside my current Mac Pro, and a USB 3 enclosure for them wouldn't set me back much, but on top of what could be an expensive machine, even for the low-end model, I'm not sure if I'll be able to afford the upgrade. That said, I could probably make do with a Mac Mini in the mean time since it would be pretty easy to just swap in a Mac Pro later, but I don't know if I can live with a mere four cores and no discrete GPU