And if I read you correctly, it essentially boils down to cost for you.
Nothing wrong with wanting to get maximum bang for your buck, but again, it goes back to my original point about there not being a mid-tier Mac Pro precisely because the imac and iMac Pro already meet them power-wise.
Hence the irony. By finally meeting every one of your demands for a Mac Pro, Apple ended up making a computer that is 100% not for any of you.
There’s a difference between a truly professional Mac for the power user who still couldn’t get the computing power he needed from an iMac Pro, and a Mac user who simply likes tinkering with his computer.
And for the longest time, the two kept being conflated together.
WWDC finally showed them for the two district user bases that they are.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe there is an audience for the Mac Pro and that crazy monitor Apple unveiled.
None of them are present here.
That’s why it’s fascinating to see this cognitive dissonance being played out in real time.
I agree the iMac and iMac Pro do meet a mid-tier performance wise, but fail miserably in comparison when it comes to flexibility. Traditional buyers of a desktop Mac simply wouldn't buy and iMac or iMac Pro because of their form factor and the design flaws that come with it.
And Apple did not meet 100% of the demands, they completely failed when it came to realising value at the entry level. And before you get all excited don't confuse cost with value, they are different concepts. Something costing $1bn would be excellent value if you could earn $10bn from it, while something costing $1k would represent very poor value if you only make $1.1k from it. The Mac Pro starting at $5999 has a very poor spec for the money. It makes no sense to buy this machine at base spec and upgrading it to a useful point make you step back and question whether it is worth it. This is why it represents poor value at the low end as too much of the cost is made up of engineering for features only the top 1% would ever use, but it comes across as a fancy case and some 'Apple Tax'. It's all about perception.
Take workstations from other manufacturers (Dell, HP, Lenovo) and even their high-end models have a low entry point (which again you wouldn't buy) but the starting price is around $3k. Even though you would spec it out to a similar price to the Mac Pro you get the feeling less of the product is made up of 'fancy case', yet these products scale just as high if not higher than the Mac Pro if you need them to and are also engineered properly - i.e. they are not cheap desktop PCs. They also offer onsite support, which Apple don't do, which is ridiculous on such a 'Pro' machine. There is simply more perceived value.
Apple have simply priced the Mac Pro too high at the low end because they don't want to cannibalise sales of the iMac Pro, but they fail to see desktop buyers don't buy all in one computers. They are cannibalising their own sales by pricing too high as customers waiting for the reveal have now seen Apples cards and decided to move on - no point waiting any longer. If Apple had the starting point with a 10-core Xeon, 1TB SSD (they aren't expensive any longer) and a mid-range GPU many would swallow the $5999 starting point as it would seem like good value. 32GB RAM isn't so much of an issue, but Apple should probably ship it with 48GB to use all of the memory channels. An 8-core CPU, 32GB RAM, an ancient GPU and 256GB SSD doesn't represent value at $5999. Any benefits of the engineering are lost because of the low spec and high price.
Again it's not tinkering, it's running a small business where you have to do your own IT, compared to employing someone to do it for you. The big guys still 'tinker', they just employ their own engineers to do it. And it's called maintenance. There is a difference, between that and tinkering. Tinkering is something enthusiasts do because they want bragging rights after they have overclocked something. Maintenance is what businesses have to do because of a failure or to implement an upgrade because something is or will interrupt their workflow and they like to avoid maintenance as it costs money. That's the difference, tinkering you do for fun, maintenance you do to keep things running.
As for 'truly professional', don't talk rubbish. Professional - engaged in a specific activity as one's main paid occupation rather than an amateur. The fact I get paid for my efforts defines me as a professional as it does for many others, regardless of the size of their business. I don't need to be earning millions for this to be true. Apple did not show distinct user bases at WWDC to define the 'true professional' either, it convinced you that an all in one computer is a replacement for a desktop simply because it has the same performance. Stop drinking the cool aid, it's not a replacement. They just simply decided to tell you which one you should buy and to push the limits of pricing at the same time. And this is just pure greed. Apple have always been more expensive and to a point it's been worth it. That is no longer true.
Ask yourself a question, if Apple released Mac OS on HP Z, Dell Precision, etc how many would buy those compared to the Mac Pro?
And one more thing. For such a 'Pro' machine why doesn't it have more than one PSU or a hot-swap PSU?
