Do you have any real numbers instead of "huge"? Can that community pay for the development of an mMP that suits them? I do not think so. Look at the pattern: everyone screams for user upgradable systems when in reality user want to avoid Apples upgrade costs. Part of Apple expensive BTO options may be to cover the whole platforms development costs. Using systems for >3-4 years (which make sense) also dilute the contribution to sustainable development.
(As good of a context as any to comment & continue)
On sales volume, I think it comes down to a couple of factors and considerations. Sure, we can try to wave over a crystal ball to guess at unit volumes, but the IMO simpler metric is simply to ask "what's the 3rd Party aftermarket like?". Point being that if Company XYZ is willing to design, fab & sell something like an SSD upgrade for a tcMP, then the tcMP market is presumably "big enough" that they see a viable business opportunity. And so on.
Problem with this approach is that these opportunities may be "too small" for the $0.9T Market Cap Apple to consider worth bothering to go after ... but this really also crosses this conversation into marketing, cross-product line revenues, and so forth. To this end, has not nearly every new Mac Pro (style) machine been rolled out with the marketing hype of "Most Powerful Mac EVER!"? The point here is that Halo products often exist for mindshare, not to be particularly profitable on their own.
And pulling a line from the above:
Look at the pattern: everyone screams for user upgradable systems when in reality user want to avoid Apples upgrade costs.
This is really getting into the underlying motivations of the customer, with the emphasis here being why they select 3rd Party rather than Genuine OEM Apple. The history here is functionally twofold: agility and cost. Specifically, the 3rd Parties are typically much faster to market than Apple and they're cheaper to boot.
Apple effectively has a conflict-of-interest against themselves here because the better they are in providing ongoing support (hardware upgrades) to their fleet of existing Mac Pros, the more that that customer can defer buying a new Mac (hardware replacement lifecycle) which reduces sales. However, this point also merits some consideration of the interplay between short term and long term interests .. the cliché is how the sum of replacement parts for an automobile can cost more than a new car. Again, even if it isn't particularly profitable for Apple to provide such ongoing hardware upgrades, there's also that marketing/prestige factor, as well as being a strategy to build customer loyalty. For example, Mike Valentine (of radar detector fame) sells the V-1 and part of his marketing is that any customer can return their existing one to have it upgraded to the latest version ... which results in recurring sales and a customer that's less likely to defect to the competition.
Moving on ...
On who's the right/wrong/?? customer for the Mac Pro.
First, a lot is going to depend on what Apple decides to do, which ultimately boils down to features & price. If they make the minimum buy-in too high, they're going to drive candidates to other solutions.
Second, there is a valid point in the observation of "buying something that I'm not going to use", as a value paradigm. To this end, the externalities of the cheesegrater cMP was essentially that the 'cost' was primarily a physically big & heavy box. And this can be seen with the parallels to the G4 PowerMac vs Cube: in a nutshell, the customer base wasn't willing to sacrifice expandability potential for a smaller size when it was at the ~same MSRP: the perennial question here would have been "how much cheaper would the Cube needed to have been in order to sell?".
Overall, I see the potential for this same pitfall in the iMac Pro versus future mMP: the iMac Pro at $5K offers a nice display at the cost of expandability potential, whereas the mMP deletes the display but (presumably) will do well in the expandability department ... so just what will the market (ie, customer) determine as the correct price point for it? Naturally, the more divergent that Apple chooses to make the configurations (especially the minimum configs), the harder it will be for customers to decide between the two.
Finally, let's not completely forget another aspect of Apple's history, which is of special edition "Anniversary" Macs. These have usually ended up being beautiful but ultimately underpowered & overpriced pieces of art ...
-hh
. No a modular MP is not for me, but you know, I will not speak ill about it it just becuase of that. The discussion would be much nicer and much more informative if you accepted and accounted for different user cases. There is more than a tendancy here that the 2013 MP gets hate when in relity Apple should get hate for not having a ungradable MP in their product portfolio. Similarly, if the iMac Pro will be discontinued becuase of a mMP, I will be very irritated. In my opinion they are both ”Pro” but aimed at different user settings.
