PCIe configuration of the 2023 Mac Pro: 1 Two double-wide full length x16 gen4 slots Two double-wide full length x8 gen4 slots Two single-wide full length x8 gen4 slots One single-wide half length x4 gen3 slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card and up to 192GB RAM.
Meanwhile, a typical real-world workstation mobo like the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE offers: 2 7 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slot(s) Up to 2TB RAM
In my use case, I require 512GB RAM (next stop 1TB) and plenty of cores for heavy parallel build action, a Blue-team graphics card, 3 cards of fully-populated Asus Hyper M.2 X16 and a high-speed NIC, plus some life-improvements like a 4-port USB-C card. Requirements that seem to outstrip the capabilities of this new machine.
Hey, I love the appearance and feel, and I'm used-to and productive with MacOS on desktop. Up until iOS and newer cousins took over Apple's revenue sheet in the early 2010s, the x86 Mac Pro was a permanent fixture under my desk and a reliable partner. That plus a well-specced Linux box and I never had to worry about being out of action. But since that time, my impression is that it and Mac on the desktop in general feels like it's in decline, neglected, it's software increasingly abandonware, Apple's conception of the target market is every-more narrowly defined and on a just-enough basis, and perhaps most important of all the system's first allegiance no longer to me.
Maybe I need to accept or re-conceptualize that Mac Pro today is just for a narrow group of content creators, at least for the meantime...
1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 2 https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/wo...