I'm just excited the older models will be getting less expensive soon so I can afford one.
No internal expansion, no built in CD/DVD drives, limited memory, no apparent means of upgrading the video, and if one of the components breaks its off to the store. Yet if predictions are right this will be even more expensive than current solutions. Worse, Thunderbolt enclosures are not cheap, if can even find them.
Unless those price predictions are way off base I and a few others I know have even started serious talk of going hackintosh.
Apple had every opportunity to produce a slimmer tower that still gave options for expansion. Instead its a replay of the "Cube" days.
Its not even good looking, the Cube at least could pass as a conversation piece
Kind of like Apple is pulling something like this:
Mid-range desktop you say? Hmm... Yes, I've got just the thing- How about a mid-range desktop with the price of a top-end desktop?
If it turns out that there are actually a range of machines, with GPU options other than Firepro, this could still end up as a very compelling mid-to-high-end personal desktop.
GPUs are not going to make those compiles any faster, and apple has abandoned distcc. The more CPU cores the better.
I'm seriously disappointed that they are not offering a 2 or even 3 socket version of the new mac pro. They're all, fuck you iOS developers, the only people who are practically stuck on our platform.
ECC memory is a high-end feature. As is the specific choice of GPUs. Arguably, the fast PCIe SSD counts, too, although I suspect that won't last -- everyone benefits from I/O bandwidth, and there's no particular reason, other than market segmentation, for PCIe SSDs to be more expensive.
It's more a Mac Mini Pro than a Mac Pro.
This is a high end machine. Go compare:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/workstations/z820_...
Do you by any chance drive a mid-range Bentley?
Plus some kit I use won't go on the end of a thunderbolt bus...
The key in the new Mac Pro is extensibility (those 6 ports, each daisy-chainable). Thunderbolt is like a PCIe cable, you could add a better GPU, storage or whatever you wanted as external devices. It's much more open to third-party manufacturers than the current model of apple-sanctioned upgrades.