Apple has never been a company to keep things around because a few people "need" them.
This would explain why Apple kept around the Power Mac G5 and the iBook G4 for many months following the completion of the Intel switch. This would explain why the 17" MacBook Pro has the ExpressCard Slot even still to this day. Are you kidding me? Apple is absolutely a company to keep things around because large sections of their install base (who aren't the everyday consumer) will not buy their stuff otherwise.
Thunderbolt has already caught on in a big way because of it's compatibility with PCI-E. There are a few limitations today based on bandwidth, but future iterations of Thunderbolt mean that there is no difference in bandwidth between internal and external. If it goes in a PCI-E slot today, it can be a Thunderbolt device tomorrow.
Thunderbolt is still way to expensive and it is not yet on many devices. Yes, there is a PCI-E to Thunderbolt adapter out on the market. What if I want to run two things at once as is commonly done on a Mac Pro? Thunderbolt is a great idea, it is nowhere near as ubiquitous as even FireWire 800 and even that's a fairly uncommon thing to see around these days. When it is cheaper, and even half as common as USB 2.0 or, hell, even PCI-E itself, then I'll hear your claim of how widespread Thunderbolt is as a connectivity standard.
Outside of video I'm not sure there is any use for the Mac Pro that has a wide enough audience for them to continue an entire production line.
Uh, way more than video professionals use the Mac Pro, pal. Audio, 3D rendering, CAD, all of that stuff is done on Macs. Maybe not exclusively, but still there are plenty of Mac Pros out there in service being used for these things.
The Mac Pro is a relic from another era. Updated on the inside, but a relic nonetheless. Before you could rent 100 CPUs/GPUs by the hour for cheap. Before high speed data transfer like Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 and even eSATA.
I'm sorry, I must've missed something crucial to your point here. Just because the Mac Pro lacks Thunderbolt means it's a relic? Same with USB 3.0, which Intel hasn't even natively shipped support for yet? Same with eSATA which services the 17" MacBook Pro and Mac Pro customers that need it just fine with a PCI-E/ExpressCard card? If it's a relic for any reason, it's because it's still using Westmere at its high-end and not the Sandy Bridge E equivalent and it's still using, at best, the ATI Radeon HD 5780 and not the AMD Radeon HD 7970. Otherwise, yeah, you're right, it is not a Mac laptop, nor an iPad, nor an iPod touch or iPhone, and thusly it's, by post-PC standards, a relic. No, it's not a consumer toy. But that doesn't mean that it is, for a large amount, the best Mac there is.
To be honest, I'd be rather alarmed, as a shareholder, if they continue to pump money into production lines that result in nothing but disappointing and declining revenues year after year.
It's a good thing that you're not a majority shareholder then, as that kind of shortsightedness could get Apple into a lot of trouble.
I don't want to pay for things I don't want or spend time and effort removing and adding parts in order to get the MacBook I want. I suspect the overwhelming majority of Apple customers feel the same.
While a majority of Mac users might not use or value their optical drive, only a minority actually want them gone. There's a huge difference between those two and very few people in these forums seem to grasp that, sadly. Incidentally, even fewer Mac users care about having a second hard drive or a second solid state drive or a combination between the two. Were this not the case, OS X would have an easy way of setting itself up out of the box to place the user data on the locally attached hard drive while leaving the OS on the SSD, as that's the way to have a Mac with one of each kind of drive. Apple ships three product lines each capable of such a configuration (iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro) and you'd think that by now, they'd modify their setup assistant to account for such configurations. Guess what? They don't. Which can only mean one thing. People who want the Mac you want are in the minority even if people who don't care about the optical drive are in the majority.
What is comes down to is whether Apple thinks they can sell more MacBook Pros with an optical drive or without one as well as which way fits in best with where they want to take the market. One way or another, that decision has already been made.
Apple has had no trouble selling the MacBook Pros just the way they are. Hell, there have been multiple revisions now where the only thing changed is a slight speed bump. Case in point: the Late 2011 generation MacBook Pros. The MacBook Pro serves drastically different functions than the MacBook Air. To merge the two or replace the former line with the latter line will have negative repercussions for Apple and it doesn't take an ACMT know-it-all to tell either you or them that. At least, it shouldn't.
You are mistaken. I do heavy development in C++ on server software and most of the time I run two virtual machines (CentOS and Windows Server) to make sure my stuff compiles and works on those platforms. I need 8GB of RAM. I do NOT need and do NOT want an optical drive in my laptop.
You say that like it's actually taking up space and weight that would be used for something unrealistically desired. Have you ever held an Optical Drive outside of these machines...they're remarkably thin and they don't weigh anything. Barring those as complaints or the ridiculous notion that Apple would use that space for something other than needless thinness, what is your big aversion to the optical drive? Did it kill your father? Even worse, IS your father an optical drive? Because honestly, as ridiculous as that sounds, having that strong of an aversion to something on a laptop that is already thinnest in its class and wouldn't bring about anything great in its absence is about as ridiculous of an assertion as they come, I'm sorry.
