I still don't understand why people even talk about complaining about the price. It's for professionals. They have the money to spend on a powerful machine, and it will pay itself off in less than a year.
Apple are using standard parts from Intel and AMD now. Yes, the form-factor of the machine is different, but any PC using the same CPU as the Mac Pro will perform the same. These are not the days of the PowerPC Macs where Apple could justify charging so much.
What I really love is the comments that suggest a comparable PC can be had for 1/3 the price.. get real. By the time you add the GPUs, the most you would save is $400-500. Even if you build your own, you are still over $2k if you have comparable GPUs.
I think you are seriously over-estimating the GPUs Apple has put in this machine.
The D300 FirePro cards Apple are shipping in the base model are essentially an R9 270X, which is a $200 card, and a rebranded Radeon HD 7870 - you can buy those cards for
less than $200 now. So call it $350 for the video cards.
A 4770K is a faster CPU than the quad core Xeon (Xeons are a generation behind) and that's $350 or less.
So that leaves $300 for the rest of the PC. Maybe 1/3 was unrealistic, and you could spend half the price of a Mac Pro for a similar or faster gaming PC. Rather than spend $350 on two lower-end cards, it would be better to spend $500 on a GTX 780. (Nvidia cards are far better for gaming)
The Mac Pro is for people doing 3D work.
The funny thing is that due to the announced prices, a game studio I know people from has just decided to go with decked-out iMacs rather than continue waiting for the Mac Pros now.
They need the machines to be running OS X because they also do iOS work, and $3000 for a max-spec iMac gets them a large calibrated display built in, with 32GB RAM rather than 12, and a lot more storage. (256GB is nothing on a workstation)
I'm not convinced it was the right idea going with a GTX 780M rather than the D300 cards in the Mac Pro, but they seem to think it's a better solution for the money.
They figure that once they have outlived their usefulness as workstations, they will be able to get a lot more money selling off old iMacs than Mac Pros. (much bigger market)
At the other end of the scale, I know someone working in video production with a $10,000 budget to spend on his machine this year, and he won't be buying one of the new Mac Pros because it's limited to a single CPU. He would much rather swap out one of those GPUs for a second 12-core CPU.
If he can go from <3fps when encoding on his current machine (a highly overclocked 3770K) to 10fps or more, $10,000 on the system pays for itself.
GPU accelerated encoding is a nice dream, but it does not offer the controls/quality his work requires.
Audio world has been moving to USB for a while now, not even TB bandwidth is needed on that front
One thing people often forget though, is that USB audio typically requires much larger buffers and thus has a lot more latency than PCIe cards. Not many Thunderbolt interfaces exist for audio, and I don't know whether or not that solves the latency problem. Of course not all audio work relies on low latency interfaces.
My wife finally switched from PC Adobe to Mac Adobe (Dec 2012 iMac with the works) ... and can't speak to Mavericks yet, but Mountain Lion out performs Windows simply by being reliable, not crashing and not requiring weekly reboots for this or that.
How old was that PC? Windows has not been like that for more than a decade now.
