It’s great that Apple has reentered the workstation market with an offering suitable for high-end clients and workflows. Nobody can suggest Apple doesn’t offer a serious professional desktop now, and it happens to look beautiful too (LOVE the steel handles, the ones on the old cheese grater were sharp!). There are those pros who are price-sensitive and those who aren’t: who can and will pay anything for the best equipment; and this is clearly geared towards the latter. But...
This still leaves a niche for that elusive mid-range headless Mac for the so-called “prosumer” who doesn’t need or can’t afford workstation-class hardware with 8 PCI slots, but wants a strongly performing system with the option of a high-end (upgradable) graphics card using consumer-grade components. Think the typical enthusiast gamer PC. You can build awesome little systems with an RTX 2080 or similar using the micro-ATX form factor.
Apple’s only headless solution for the prosumer/gamer niche is the Mac Mini with an eGPU, but this is hardly an attractive or elegant solution. Especially when you start adding external storage and other peripherals!
The funny thing is, the Trash Can Mac looked a lot like a mid-range headless Mac but its problems were it used specialised and non-standard workstation hardware and was priced accordingly, was ultimately poorly upgradable, yet was still ridiculously thermally constrained so as to not even be able to handle a decently-sized PSU and thermal output. In other words, apart from its size it was pretty much the worst of all worlds.
I would LOVE to see a baby version of this new tower design with fewer PCI slots, a smaller PSU (say 800 W) and consumer-grade processor, RAM and graphics options using standard and swappable form-factors! The case and OS X compatibility would easily be worth a premium over similarly spec’d PCs. But until then, I think PC remains the only option.
I commend Apple on making a truly high-end system, and if I was rich I’d love to have both it and the XDR screen, but I think the gamer/amateur enthusiast market is huge and it’s a mistake to ignore it.
This still leaves a niche for that elusive mid-range headless Mac for the so-called “prosumer” who doesn’t need or can’t afford workstation-class hardware with 8 PCI slots, but wants a strongly performing system with the option of a high-end (upgradable) graphics card using consumer-grade components. Think the typical enthusiast gamer PC. You can build awesome little systems with an RTX 2080 or similar using the micro-ATX form factor.
Apple’s only headless solution for the prosumer/gamer niche is the Mac Mini with an eGPU, but this is hardly an attractive or elegant solution. Especially when you start adding external storage and other peripherals!
The funny thing is, the Trash Can Mac looked a lot like a mid-range headless Mac but its problems were it used specialised and non-standard workstation hardware and was priced accordingly, was ultimately poorly upgradable, yet was still ridiculously thermally constrained so as to not even be able to handle a decently-sized PSU and thermal output. In other words, apart from its size it was pretty much the worst of all worlds.
I would LOVE to see a baby version of this new tower design with fewer PCI slots, a smaller PSU (say 800 W) and consumer-grade processor, RAM and graphics options using standard and swappable form-factors! The case and OS X compatibility would easily be worth a premium over similarly spec’d PCs. But until then, I think PC remains the only option.
I commend Apple on making a truly high-end system, and if I was rich I’d love to have both it and the XDR screen, but I think the gamer/amateur enthusiast market is huge and it’s a mistake to ignore it.
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