Maurizio

If there is one thing to learn from these facts, is that Apple is actually working on a flying car.
Remember, i told it first 

Maurizio

PS: just joking

While i agree on the fact that new design is more pro and less design oriented, i would like to stress the fact that the discussion about ports is fake and the position that the 2016 mac book pro had less ports is a myth. I had a Mac Book Pro 2011; had it more ports ? Well, actually not. It just had two usb ports. Yes, it had an Ethernet port, of absolutely no use unless you had a cabled network. I hadn’t. Yes, it had a Firewire port; it was legacy already, never used it. It had a displayport connection, very useful to people using an external screen. Not me. Well, but at least you could connect it with a single cable to a dock, so you could charge it, connect to studio HD and audio interface ? No way. While some Windows computer had some expensive docking option, no Mac had one. Si, essentially, just two usb port. Yes, i used the display port a couple of times, in three years. So yes, the Mac Book Pro 2019 that i owns today have 4 physical ports, but being them multipurpose, i can use them in a lot of different situations. The new Mac Pro, if you are on batteries (or use a Usb C or Thunderbolt screen) have exactly one port less of my 2019 Mac Book Pro. Happily, it has three Thunderbolt controllers, so more bandwidth for more docks and dongles. Essentially, stop believing the trolls that online press helped diffuse, and look ti real life use cases. Some gains, a lot not.

Interesting discussion, but that  imho miss the important point: if Apple use at least two factories to build them, it means they expect to sell quite a lot of them.

ITGUYINSD said:

What would one be doing when rack mounting it?  It doesn't have a true server operating system, but a server app (with minimal functionality at that) which runs on top of macOS.

With racks typically down the hall and in a secure room, how would one use one of these?

None ever said (other then this articole) that it was proposed as a server; it is just a new Mac Pro with a rack mountable enclosure. In place where racks are used, it may be convenient to have three or four of them mounted in a rack, may be with video equipement, huge raids, and so on.

madan said:

You know, come to think of it.  You could get an iMac Pro, with 64 GB of RAM, a base Xeon, more storage and a Vega 56, stone the base Mac Pro over the head and it STILL COMES WITH A 5K LG MONITOR BUILT IN.  How nuts is that?

Sure it doesn't come with support with 12 TB 3 lanes but srsly, you're probably not going to need that.  A base Xeon wouldn't be able to handle that throughput anyways.  So honestly, the iMac Pro is a better deal because in 5-6 years you just buy another iMac Pro and you get a whole new system, PLUS A WHOLE NEW MONITOR, to boot, for the same price.  Like I said, the Mac Pro only makes "sense" once you start cracking the 20,000 USD threshold. Once you start putting in gpus and cpu configurations that can handle the crazy bandwidth and performance than an iMac Pro just can't touch. But the base system? A Vega 56 is 30% faster than the Mac Pro's base Radeon 580.  And the system costs LESS and BRINGS  A MONITOR.

No, i do not think you get what a new Mac Pro is.
I have a Mac Pro 2009 running in my home studio; in 2009, i paid 3000 euros for it; it had Sata 2, USB 2, a few hard disk, and a GT120 graphic card, and an 8 core double cpu running at 2.16 Ghz. The lowest possible end.
Today, it run with nvme SSD, has USB3, an RX580, and two 6 core 3.4Ghz CPU, and it still current.

All this was massively less expensive than buying the 3 iMac that has become obsolete in the same timeframe.

The Mac Pro is a PCI machine; it is evolutive, that is the whole point; of course, the stellar point is when you spend more than 20K$, but it fully make sense in
a context where needs and gains evolve.

But as of today, if i had the kind of needs and money, i wouldn't buy an iMac Pro, i would buy a new Mac Pro, low end, and let it evolve in base of my needs; it would
be massively less expensive, and upgradable to technologies that today not yet exists, like USB4. In ten years from now it would be still useful.
An iMac Pro bought today, before a refresh, will be obsolete in about 3 years, and not upgradable.

Anyway, the point about the Mac Pro, as many poster said here, it is not a machine for gamers, it is not a machine for the masses; it is a machine for those that need it; they will reconise it.

Maurizio