chetzar. From my experience (45 years) your comments on alienating professionals are so wide of the mark. I started on the Wintel platform in a PROFESSIONAL environment. We transitioned to Mac because they gave far more productivity, far more bang for bucks when it came to what really mattered. PRODUCTION. As far as the creative world goes Apple dominated that for some time, but sadly a lot of administrators brought up on the Wintel platform were reluctant to make the jump, and even sadder is because for many it meant that changing to Apple would remove the deliberate mystification that surrounded any computerisation at the time and which I assure you existed.
With the myriad of different potential problems on the Winter platform, the myriad of different combinations of ports/networks/cabling, the potential for a real cock up was always there, safeguarding some IT staff, whereas the advent of the Mac meant that although port configurations were sometimes limited it was a simple case of plugging a unit into a power supply and then start producing....which was what the machines were designed to do.
No messing around with win.ini files or system files, and this allowed the creative professionals to get on with their jobs, which was not playing around with different cables/configurations etc.
This idea that 'professionals' use platforms and excludes the Mac is just bonkers!
Apple too have made changes to ports/configurations and the 2nd attempt to move away from Intel, but mainly as a result of technological changes that result in higher productivity, but you take a PC out of a box and get that up and running when it has this card or that card just thrown into a large chassis, and sadly many of the past problems with Wintel still exist today.
I hope they completely move away from Intel, and Apple have rarely had an upgradeable CPU, although the Mac Pro 2019 was suggested to be upgradeable via the ifixit teardown, so not having an upgradeable CPU has been something the Macs have lived with and still thrived on.
Yesterday brought that back, when I had to put together a Wintel system, where very little had been changed from the past....A chassis you could put a car in, to look big and important, with a micro board in it! A 512Gb SSD, a Geforce card and a separate Ethernet card and an additional card that carried video/audio/ethernet also...none of which was required.
Then of course you had the separate monitor, complete with display port, hdmi, multiple USB's etc. etc., then the cabling from the monitor to whatever card and port a user happened to plug the display port cable into, and where of course instead of a plug and play philosophy a user would have to gen up on instructions for EVERY individual card they had decided to put in their respective machine, or in this case every individual card with cards duplicating functions served already on other cards in the same chassis, serving no real purpose at all. Oh and of course the additional external web cam sitting like a dead bird on top of a monitor.
Then of course the switch on to see the usual 'cannot find display port cable' or similar, let alone the massive increase in resource costs in producing all of this stuff, including more cables, greater space requirement.
Then take a good spec 27in. iMac. iMac Pro, take it out of the box, plug in the ethernet cable and switch on! With the Mac Pro, take it out of the box, plug in your monitor, plug in your ethernet, plug to mains...switchon.
The upgrades to Mac Pro, are then through NEED rather than ego.
Mikey, it sounds to like you have a lot of experience as a Professional as a creative/content creator end user and I think you may be looking at this from the lens of an end user that does content creation. While I certainly think Mac's have historically excelled in several of the creative/content creation applications, for those who do any sort of cross-platform development, the ability to load Unix and/or Windows via VM or Bootcamp is still critical.
Few things I want to provide for thought:
1) From a port perspective: Yes, it is true, Mac's have a streamlined/simplified I/O on their machines, this, depending on your use case, can be seen as a Positive OR Negative.
2) Building a PC/W10 Machine: Building a PC is really very simple these days. Sounds like you had a specific use case and custom hardware that was required. Sure, that can get a bit tricky, but overall, building workstations is very easy.
3) You refer to CPU replacement for upgradeability: While it is certainly nice to be able to upgrade CPU's, the majority of workstation upgrades/repairs do not involve CPU's, but instead Memory (RAM) or Storage. When it comes to Apple Silicone, their SOC's have Memory and Storage backed into the "CPU" if you will, hence why it is a system on chip configuration. It is not uncommon for companies IT departments to upgrade end-users memory or storage over time, instead of replacing the entire workstation. When it comes to MacBooks, this is obviously not possible and IF Apple bakes their Memory and Storage into the SOC for the MacPro, then it wont be possible on those machines either. Believe it or not, this can actually shorten the useful lifespan of your workstation. Imagine the trashcan Mac, but worse.
4) Value (Hardware/Software): I think it's fair to say, and widely know, that you are paying a premium for the hardware when you buy a Mac, no questions asked. It's FAR more cost effective to build a Windows/PC workstation. As for their GPU's, if you want to look at a specific professional use, Apple still refused to even allow the use of NVidia GPU's on their workstations, even though they are far superior for After Effects than AMD cards. Nothing against AMD, I have used, and currently use AMD CPU's and love them, but their video cards simply do not provide the same level of performance as NVidia cards, particularly when it comes to rendering in AE and anything that requires Ray Tracing.
5) As for having to edit INI files and such, that is not the typical case, it again sounds like you have some form of a custom setup that required an A-Typical setup.
6) PC Cases: If you bought a Full Size ATX Case for a Micro-ATX board, well, there is nothing I can offer for ya there, other than buy a Micro-ATX case next time *shrug*
7) Cabling: You can get Motherboards with Thunderbolt controllers built in and they even can carry video signal from your GPU. As for DisplayPort - outside of the Apple EcoSystem, DP is very widely used and a very common port. HDMI is also an industry standard. Both cables can carry Audio. Regarding USB: Well, you don't have to use the USB ports on the monitor. And if DP/HDMI/USB is too much for you, just buy a thunderbolt display. They are several out there to choose from.
Companies like Puget Systems wouldn't be doing so good if "professionals" didn't feel the Apple had left them behind for so long.
Again, the MacPro is a wonderful machine that is incredibly powerful. Expensive, but powerful. I just hope they continue to offer an Intel version for professionals who need the cross-platform capabilities. If they don't and the Apple Silicone MacPro is not upgradeable/repairable, then Apple just put themselves back in the same spot they were in with the trashcan MacPro, only worse.
At any rate, I can hope, but only time will tell how they decide to proceed
