Well, strictly speaking, you can see about 40
Mac Pro front panels. In a room that - even if it
is a real, live lab - has been very carefully set-dressed for a promo video. Could be Mac Pros, could be custom disc arrays with Mac Pro front panels to look good, could be a black frame covered in MP front panels hung up in a meeting room that they've dressed up as a "secret lab". Who knows?
Anyway, it's hardly surprising for Apple to be using Mac Pros in a development lab - at a minimum they'll all need it for XCode, and otherwise the Mac Pro
is a perfectly capable Xeon workstation - the issues are (a) price (and I'm pretty sure Apple won't be paying retail for their own kit!) and (b) choice (e.g. that's about 20 more Mac Pros than you'd want to rack together and maintain without
proper rackmount features like lights-out management, redundant PSUs, hot-swappable drives, RAM
not on the underside of the machine... and they've probably spent more money on the optical thunderbolt cables that they'd need to hook up all those XDR displays than they did on the Mac Pros).
There's no question that the Mac Pro "has utility" - the problem is that a big part of that utility depends upon your dependency on MacOS outweighing the cost of the hardware.
There was an excellent series of YouTube videos from Neil Parfitt (see below) which make a good (if, at times, reluctant) case for why the Mac Pro was what
he needed (PCIe slots and all - he has a shedload of dedicated audio cards and a ton of RAM he can have a 100 piece virtual orchestra at his fingertips) - but look at this in context (which you'll pick up if you watch a few of his videos): here is a guy who switched from PC
to Mac
because Apple bought Logic and dropped the PC version. He has a convoluted setup which allows him to compose in Logic and have everything mirrored in Pro Tools
because his clients don't accept Logic format and the "baseline" that he was upgrading from was a Rube Goldberg looking lash up containing
two Mac Pro trashcans, several thunderbolt PCIe cages and a bunch other stuff.
I'm not going to second-guess his judgement about not being prepared to move away from Logic, but that's clearly the underlying reason he can justify the cost of his set-up. Which is the problem - Up to 2019, Apple haven't been competing to grow their share of the workstation market beyond existing customers "locked in" to MacOS - which is going to be an ever-shrinking pool.
But, as long as Macs were basically just fancy PC clones, there wasn't much Apple could do to distinguish themselves. ...the key question is whether switching to Apple Silicon would mess up workflows like this (which, while centred on Logic, depends on a ton of third-party specialist software and hardware). If so, Apple might as well not bother with an Apple Silicon equivalent of the Mac Pro.
