Disclaimer: I'm not trying to start a flame war. I'm just genuinely confused as to why Mac Pros cost so much.
I honestly don't get it. What am I missing? Surely there's more to the price difference than a nicer case and the ability to (legally) run OSX...?
One is a gaming rig. It has gaming rig parts.
It's like when people complain about Quadro video cards vs Geforce cards from nVidia.
If you are running Pro-Engineer or Maya or something, and are having video issues, try calling tech support.
-- Geforce support: Hmm, neat. We don't support that on a professional level. How does it work in Windows?
-- Quadro support: Here's the ftp site, this is where we put daily or hourly revisions of the drivers. Please go download this one, and test it. If it behaves, great we'll make sure to build a non-dev driver for it. If it doesn't, give us these log files after you get the error, and we'll fix it in a couple of hours.
When you get into the Xeon systems, you're starting to worry about cooling a lot more than a generic chassis system. The Mac Pro, like the other major manufacturer's graphics workstations are designed to cool a machine running full blast for days on end.
So yes, it's damn expensive. It would be awesome if a desktop version of the Mac Pro were available to people who need more room than the Mini offers, but it is what it is.
I have no need for that kind of power at home. (or at work for that matter)
But I used to work with engineers on their workstations in the energy, entertainment and automotive industries. They'd get their new workstation, and they'd double their productivity. Take the $15,000 cost of a real monster workstation. Divide that by the number of projects that you are able to complete a year. You start seeing MAJOR benefits from machines that fast when you are able to do things in an afternoon that took a week with the last box.
On edit: Holy crap you can build a $50K workstation from HP now. 96GB memory preinstalled.