I wonder why they tout 1/8th the size in a pro machine; it's 1/8th of the size for a reason; lack of 4x 3.5" HDD bays and two optical drives jump out at me for one.
I really don't know what to think about it though; it seems to pack a lot into what is a very interesting design, but for me the two big selling points of the Mac Pro are the space inside the case and the ability to upgrade RAM, drives and GPU.
Okay, so there's more than enough Thunderbolt to add storage, and with a Fusion drive involving the internal Flash memory I suppose it ought to be okay as smaller, frequent files will stay internal, while larger files will absorb any added latency once the transfer is underway. But when you start talking about adding Thunderbolt enclosures (which aren't cheap), you have to wonder what the advantage of being 1/8th of the size really is if you need an ugly stack of disks to make the machine workable.
RAM seems covered, though is it only four slots? I notice the Mac Pro page focuses on the bandwidth and doesn't actually mention total capacity. I'm hoping there are two processor/RAM boards mirroring each other, so there would be another four slots, did they go into that in the keynote? The page doesn't have full technical specs yet.
GPUs are the big worry; my workload admittedly doesn't require cutting edge GPUs, but it'd still be nice to have as much choice as possible when it comes to picking upgrades for the future. With this new machine the cards look to have severe limitations on size, which presumably eliminates full-length and double height cards (which is a lot of them), so what does that leave us? Also, how are those cards pushing their output to monitors, is some sort of custom connector involved that cards would need to be compatible with, or is the PCIe bus fast enough to handle both data in and video out for sending into the appropriate Thunderbolt port (or the HDMI port)?
Reliance on Thunderbolt in general is something I'm just a bit iffy about; Thunderbolt would be fine if it were just a hot-pluggable PCIe standard, but it isn't quite as lightweight or direct as all that, which means it's not really the same as being able to add a fibre-channel card to a machine.
I love the case as an idea, I just have serious doubts about its viability as a workstation; but then it seems like Apple doesn't want you thinking of it as a workstation but as a "Pro" computer, but for the money you're going to end up paying I'm not sure the compact form factor is going to do it any favours, especially with the concern about storage; if it's too expensive then I'm going to have to resort to a hackintosh as I don't want to spend thousands of pounds on a machine that needs even more spent on enclosures in order to be usable.
So ehm… yeah, my verdict is that I'd love to love this machine, but I have my doubts. Radical can be nice, but the Mac Pro was a great workstation, other than the languishing without updates part, and this might just be too different.
