Sometime in 2018 I realized a MacMini was, for single-core use, faster than my then five-year-old Mac Pro ... I used Aperture, which really wanted that single-core speed. And that was disappointing, but I'm fortunate to have a cellar where I can move old tech, a kind of underground "island of misfit toys."
It is of course dated and slow, and Aperture long discontinued, but I've grown fond of it. Unlike older Mac Pros (5,1 and a 4,1) which consumed too much electricity or failed to boot or both, or the Mini, where the 10GBe port burned out, my cylinder Mac Pro has kept chugging on. It's terrific to keep on an older operating system, where I can run a few pieces of older software when needed, like for example an instance of SoftRAID where I'm now certifying two refurbished 20TB drives. I like that that machine can just work on it and not tie up my main computer. And the cellar is cool, and I put the fan control on max to keep the Mac Pro that way.
The cylinder Mac Pro was also interesting/frustrating from a peripheral standpoint: it signaled to me at the time that Apple was moving lots of former computer internals to external solutions; in my case, storage. Frustrating as the old Mac Pros were so neat with their internal sleds, but understandable as no matter how big or flexible a case you make someone will find it inadequate and still need peripherals anyway.
So I got on board with peripheral storage, which, going forward, has made machine migrations so much easier. For me, getting a new machine doesn't mean migrating crazy amounts of storage to some new machine, it just means migrating a much smaller data set and reattaching the old storage to the new.