But Intel's Sandy Bridge Xeon chipset and new E5 processors have now been put for a few months, with Dell's Precisions and other workstations now using them.
The headline wrongly suggests that the Mac Pro was canceled. It wasn't.
You can connect two external screens to an iMac, making a total of three screens.
http://gigaom.com/apple/new-27-inch-imac-supports-dual-exter...
I think you can daisy-chain six of these Thunderbolt-PCIe boxes, which would give you, what 36 monitors?
And not thunderbolt monitors, they'd be whatever the gfx cards you use support, so probably DVI or HDMI or DisplayPort.
I'm sure Apple could produce extension chassis at a lower price point than 3rd parties, if they wanted to, but I doubt they want to get into that business.
Apple's displays are now all glossy, have dropped from 16:10 to 16:9, and most have such color inconsistency across the panel that they're impossible to calibrate. An iMac without a yellow band somewhere on the screen is like a unicorn these days.
They were, but it's been a while. Quadra 840AV (1993) , PowerMac 9600 (1997).
At the time, if you wanted multiple screens, the Apple Macintosh platform provided flexibility that you couldn't get on the Windows NT side. Competitors were Silicon Graphics, Sun, and NeXT, but their workstations were way more expensive.
It's obvious that Apple has moved more towards consumers, and financially, it has worked for them. But I too would like Apple to give some love to professional desktop users.