I remain unconvinced that the high end of the MacPro level lineup is that substantial, thus it’s a low priority for them vs the lower end and non-MacPro professional markets.
It surely is small, but it has a significance beyond its size, because many important professional creatives, who have inflence across their fields, use it. Indeed, even if they lost a small amount on it, that could be considered part of their marketing budget.
And Apple clearly does care about the Mac Pro market, in spite of its small size, since they brought in a Pro Workflow team to help them design better pro products, and both the 16" MBP and the the 2019 Intel Mac Pros resulted from that:
"That team is really a deep investment on what we're doing here in the pro space," Brooks told
Mac Power Users. "And it goes well beyond just Mac Pro to MacBook Pro and even iPad Pro. You're going to see the benefits and the implications of that team across all of our Mac products and our pro products."
The product manager for this fall's 2019 Mac Pro, Doug Brooks, promised in a podcast interview this week that the impact of his Pro Workflow Team will be felt beyond this year's WWDC centerpiece.
appleinsider.com
They also had an "apology tour" in which they acknowledged the delay in replacing the 2013 MP.
So the issue isn't that the MacPro market is small and thus unimportant to Apple. The issue is that, with Apple Silicon's scaling limitations, it's become very difficult for them to make a workstation-level machine without enormous investment that doesn't make sense for them. For instance, there's a consensus among the rumors that Apple did try to make an "Extreme" (4 x Max) M2 chip for the MP, but were unsucessful. If so, that's not the actions of a company that doesn't care about the MP. Thus, if AS scaled better, you'd see a more capable Mac Pro, in spite of the small market size.