Serious question: what do people use these for?
HN really shows a lot of ignorance whenever Mac Pros are discussed. HN readers, for the most part, are not the market for these devices. The market is non-tech companies, with little or no IT staff, that have extremely resource-intensive tasks. They buy Macs because non-IT people can figure out how to use Macs on their own. They buy the top of the line because it makes their jobs easier. They don't care about the price tag because it's still cheaper than staffing an IT department.
The price of a Mac Pro isn't the price of a good computer. It's the price of a good computer that is guaranteed to work, under warranty, and comes with basic IT service from at the local mall. That's useless to someone who knows how to build and administer their own machine, but easily worth $50k to a profitable business.
That's what I mean by a more beefy model.
>And when you are done, your desk is covered by your Mac cluster
It seems like it would be straightforward to make it so a bunch of stuff could go in a single stack with the same footprint.
eGPUs currently are kind of a wild west of development and are still trying to decide on basic stuff like form factor and how to route USB passthroughs. That concept you linked looks like it sidesteps a lot of that by using multiple Thunderbolt connections at once, though.
That's indeed why you buy a workstation.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pixar-uses-apples-mac-pro-to...
And Apple just lagged begind.
For example, Nvidia came with super fast GPUs but it was almost impossible to upgrade your Mac Pro with them. So a lot of companies jumped to Windows.
Also the software changed a lot. Nowadays Houdini is very big and 3DsMax and Maya are being replaced with Blender.
But I think they have something with their 'cheap' reference monitor.
Honestly $50k for the high end model means this will be a middle-of-the-road priced piece of equipment in a lot of studios in the world of £20k microphones and speakers.
For example Calvin Harris has at least one of these new Mac Pros (spec unknown but most likely the highest) in his studio and he has _speakers_ worth more than it.
I'd assume ILM and competitors, art schools, etc, are queuing up to buy them as needed.
Video, effects, CAD, 3D are mostly done on Windows and Linux.
If you're working on professional films and TV shows, this is obviously worth the price. Studios wouldn't be buying them for their designers and editors if it weren't.
It goes without saying this isn't for consumers or developers.