> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.
Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops.
That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either.
People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro.