Curious was this tiny market segment due to slower model releases or the big snafu of the Mac Pro trash can of 2013-2017 which pretty much drove so many Mac Pro users to custom Windows PC configs running Intel i9/AMD cpu's with AMD/NVidia cards? Or did the two not have the causality and affect relate to one another?
I was there - yes to both. It was over 2,000 days from the release of the 6,1 to the release of the 7,1.
The 1,1 to 5,1 Mac Pros were general purpose workstations - they used industry standard parts and were priced competitively.
Then P.T. Barnum & Sir Idiot Boy decided that what was truly important for a workstation was it's looks, not it's performance. So they rehashed the G4 Cube and gave us the 6,1 aka, the trashcan. Shrinking a desktop down to a small cylinder required removing the thing that workstation users needed - expandability.
This picture explains it best:
The bill to replace the missing functionality was around $2,000. The true believers told everyone that we should just readjust our workflows to what the trashcan could actually do, along with a very unhealthy dose of
why do you need that?
In my case, to move to a trash can, I would also need to buy:
1. A 5 bay external thunderbolt 2 enclosure for my internal hard drives.
2. A 4 bay external thunderbolt 2 enclosure for my back up system.
3. An external thunderbolt 2 enclosure for my Blu-ray Player.
4. An external dock to connect my USB sticks, my scanner, and other peripherals.
All of these would have power bricks of indeterminate quality, in addition we would need to add a rats nets of cables, introducing yet more points of failure in the system.
Speaking of points of failure, lets start with the video cards.
The D700 GPU (of which there were 2) would get cooked in the enclosure - Sir Idiot Boy simply didn't understand the concept of heat dissipation. Apple replaced a lot of D700s. Added bonus - the idiots at apple put the GPU ROM on the motherboard. This means that to move to the next generation of graphics cards, the entire motherboard would need a refresh.
Sir Idiot Boy also thought that everyone would rewrite their software to take advantage of the 2 GPUs, which of course, never happened.
The design also ensured that the user could peg either the CPU or the GPU. You could not peg both of them, and neither of them could be pegged for very long, which kinda defeated the purpose of a workstation - but hey, it really looked good sitting on the executives desk, and that is what really matters.
This was also the time when we got the NAND memory modules instead of real sata ssd drives, meaning they were not end user replacement parts.
The all in one enclosure also meant that if anything went down - the entire machine had to go back to Apple, and you would have no idea of when it would come back. If you didn't have a spare, you were dead in the water until the trashcan came back.
None of this was conducive to workflows that needed a workstation. But hey, they looked great sitting there on a desk, and that is what truly matters, amirite?
By 2016, the surviving trashcans that were on corporate leases were ready for replacement. The problem was Apple didn't have a replacement - all Apple offered was to lease the exact same product, or a Imac Studio Pro, which had all of the disadvantages of the trashcan, with an added side of screen roulette.
In 2017, Ryzen arrived and completely changed the industry. 15 - 25% IPC gains generation to generation came back into play, and the Apple "offerings" were nothing more than dongles for Final Cut and Logic. At this point, people are starting to look for the exits, or going the Hackintosh route and having much, much faster Mac Pros than anything Apple could deliver.
Apple went on the apology tour to tell the dwindling faithful that
we hear you, and we have an incredible product coming.....
The incredible product was the Mac Pro 7,1. An overpriced 2016 workstation released in 2019. Every single subsystem was obsolete on the day it was released. Everything from the 14+++nm CPUs to the PCIe 3.0 I/O. The base model was shipped with an AMD video card that was 2 generations back when it was released.
A $1,200 Ryzen system could out perform it on many tasks, and Apple and the remaining true believers continued to dream up edge cases where the 7,1 would out perform a Threadripper or Eypc based AMD system.
In fields that need workstations, companies want things like road maps - Apple doesn't deliver that, and hasn't for well over a decade. Apple isn't a computer company - they are a luxury phone company that dabbles in computers and software.