Those Mac Pros are going to be expensive
marco.org
marco.org
I understand why people like to speculate. It can be fun. But I don't understand so much why people like to publish their speculation, and even less why people would upvote it.
CPU improvements have been so stagnant on the high end. Suddenly getting a 40% clock increase out of a chip isn't just a way to save money, it gets you the equivalent of a multiple generation leap.
A friend has a mid-range ($300 I think) Intel chip, now approaching 3 years old, but running at 4.5 GHz and it is STILL notably faster than even the most expensive Haswell part sold right now. Particularly in single threaded it crushes. Those 10% efficiency improvements each chip rev are nice, but they can't come close to a massive clock speed jump like that.
SO weirdly enough now I'm considering overclocking a self-built system because you can't just wait a year and buy a regular system that is as fast anymore.
If you work for a film studio, then I can understand blowing 3 grand on a machine. But most folks I know are buying these to run photoshop and illustrator, then claiming that a PC simply would not do. My POS laptop runs these programs fine, and my $750 new PC box runs them like lightning.
They aesthetically please the eye in clean, minimalist offices.
Running OS X with (mostly) no major issues. Given that most software is available for at least two operating systems, it's really down to choice these days. Sometimes, sentimentality and/or perceived value overrides rationality. I'm pretty sure this is OK and not a major flaw in humanity, most of the time.
Bootcamping - go ahead, try that on a Windows box. I Bootcamp into Win 8 and OS X. After a few driver updates, Windows 8 performs flawlessly (aside from, you know, being Windows 8). If I really felt like it, I'd run Linux as a third option, but it's way more convenient to run it as a VM.
People get way to wound up about the hardware/OS choices that other people make. Really, aside from having to do support for them, it should probably only be about as controversial as hair length.
The only thing I can possibly imagine would be some seriously high-end 3D rendering or massively parallel simulation software.
To the OPs point, there is zero reason to get the Mac Pro over even a Mac Mini.
Seems like there's a hole in Apple's lineup. You can't get a discrete GPU without a monitor attached (iMac) or spending >$3000. Not that it matters much for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. which are not GPU-parallelizable anyway. At least not yet.
It's absolutely appalling.
So, to address your point, as another poster has mentioned you probably had previous-generation CPUs. OEMs get relatively generous discounts at the end of product lifecycles so as to encourage gargantuan purchase orders, and consumers don't see such discounts ever.
I'm willing to bet that Apple won't even bother with the 4-core models, unless they want to hit a very low price point.
On the opposite, insanity side of things, I could easily see a >$10k Mac Pro with 12 cores, 128GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD, and 12GB of VRAM.
It's amazing to think how as recently as the 90s it was completely normal to spend $20K+ on a Sun or SGI workstation to plop on an engineers desk. Now spending that type of money requires effort, and you'll end up with a machine with a quarter terabyte of RAM, four 30" monitors, etc.
Computers are so damn cheap.
You used to have to really want access to a computer. Today's computers are a mighty bargain.
Is it newsworthy that Mac Pros will be expensive? They have always been >$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.
People who care about the price difference will run a Hackintosh. If you have more money than sense (or time, patience, etc) then the Mac Pro is a pretty sweet machine.
Depends what you view as comparable. The price delta between a Mac Pro and a HP or Dell workstation with Xeon CPU's and ECC Ram is usually far under $1000 for comparable base models.
All this is assuming, of course, that the new Mac Pros live up to the hype and provide those amazing performance gains. (Hardware AND software)
Hardware is hardware, so the pretty Mac Pro box isn't worth much, when the same hardware is available elsewhere. Perhaps it makes the employees feel more important at work. That said, a couple of days ago, HN had an article with evidence that the more you make your employees feel like the company is on the edge of collapse - the better they'll perform.
If there's one thing Marco missed, it's that the larger L3 cache will help some single-threaded workloads run faster on the higher-end Xeons.