How many of these mac pros are they going to sell? I have no idea but I'm guessing not too many.
Clue: an order of magnitude more than 200 or it wouldn't exist.... Nobody has the figures, but you can use the Fermi approach: annual Mac sales are in the tens of millions, so if only
one in a thousand Mac users gets a Mac Pro, then you're still talking about tens of
thousands.
But just imagine if they were only ever going to make 200 of them.
...so you find some nice-looking mass-produced wheels rather than designing your own from scratch. Ikea have some reasonable looking ones for £15 (retail - so that includes a profit margin for everybody in the chain) and if Apple phones up Ikea or their (probably) Chinese supplier I'm sure they could get 10,000 or so in aluminium finish at a similar price.
That's why Ferarris are so expensive not because they are 20x better and it's why a computer part where they are probably making only about 1000 sets of wheels is way more expensive than something generic you can buy on the local store for $20
Supercars are more expensive because they're designed to extract money from multi-millionaires, who want them to look good in the country club parking lot. How much of that cost is justified by the bill-of-materials, how much is excessive profit margin (and whether the engine is actually a regular Ford one with 'Supercar Corp'-branded rocker covers) is irrelevant. Oh, and the reason the extras are ridiculously expensive is that its a wheeze for keeping the sticker price of the base model merely huge and raking in pure profit on the extras*.
Plus, if you decide that you
don't want to pay $10,000 for a Ferrari car radio or insure your tyres for $5000 each, you can go out and buy a Ford pickup
without having to re-take your driving test and plan a new route to the shops using only Ford-compatible roads. Apple don't make affordable pickups (i.e. a mini tower with a couple of PCIe slots) and switching to PC can mean a major upheaval to your workflow - which they're exploiting by making the only full-size desktop system they offer so expensive.
Thing is (if you want to keep to the silly car analogy) Apple have never been Ford, but for most of the 2000s and into the 2010s they didn't used to be Ferrari, either. Toyota, maybe? They've always been "premium" but this "if you need to ask the price you can't afford it" attitude with the Mac Pro is a turn for the worse (the wheels and the XDR display stand are inconsequential in themselves but really show up Apple's greed). Long term problem is - the PC world is laughing at them while they concentrate on seeing how much they can squeeze from users locked-in to MacOS. Eventually, that could kill the platform.
* Go look at Apple's prices for RAM and SSD upgrades c.f. third party M.2 and SODIMM prices (remembering to account for the price of the memory that the upgrade would be
replacing and that any prices you find online will already include profit for the retailer) or even the $200 VESA adapter which simply provides the 4 boltholes that every other mid- to high-end display has built into the housing.
