I think you said most of what needs to be said with “Apple has updated the macs that people actually buy”.
I don’t think they intended to kill off the Mac Pro; I think they probably intended to skip over Broadwell/Skylake in 2015 and target Kaby Lake for early 2017. But when they sat down in late 2015/early 2016 to figure out what the 2017 release would actually look like, they realized they had a problem: workloads appropriate for dual, medium-powered GPUs had never really materialized. Users wanted one 200W+ GPU instead, and that’s not possible in the cylinder enclosure.
Basically, they blew the call on the future technology roadmap; it happens. Apple already described how some on the team came to that realization sooner, some later, described as a gradual process. They didn’t decide to re-architect/re-envision the Mac Pro until late 2016 or even early 2017.
This is a real product management failure, one rarely seen at Apple. But if you read about how they’re going the design process for the new platform, I think you’d agree that they’re determined to give users what they need in a new Mac Pro.
re: the mini, it’s never sold well, including the quad core into the server space (before it’s cancellation). I think they will rev it, I wish just a spec update to the current form factor using the June 2017 budget iMac as a platform. But apparently they have other plans for it. Or it’s cancelled, but Cook last October implied there would be a future announcement, presumably new models.
