Relax dude. I was saying with how obsessed Apple is about design and how things feel, having to introduce additional adapters just to share devices is dumb.
Apple's obsession is with being minimalist in some areas, but that does not include making dongles pop out the the other side.
The Apple Mac store section of "Graphics and displays" :
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/displays
The very first product listed is a mDP to VGA adapter. Four out of the first six products listed are dongles. Anyone who want to interact with the large market of Graphics products on the market probably has a dongle or two to connect to Apple computers. If Apple was obsessed with minimizing the dongle market they wouldn't have mutated DP into "yet another" form factor. There is very little evidence to support your hypothesis.
You may think it is dumb, minimizing dongles is not one of the top primary objectives of Apple's core design criteria. In fact, it is often almost the opposite in trends to adopt connectors and ports that no one else has. (Apple Display connector, etc. )
Thinness is an Apple obsession. It pervades every other Mac design except the Mac Pro. If Apple were to cave to their obsession they'd kill off the Mac Pro because thinness is a conflicted goal for a $2,000+ workstation.
You know it supports PCIe and display port protocols right? Routing through integrated graphics isn't the only solution there. Also it didn't budge the prices on the other lines when implemented.
When Apple had to add discrete graphics to the MBP 15" to get around the integrated graphics problem the price jumped $100 (move from 9400M only 15" to the HD graphics + 330M 15" ). Apple isn't likely to add parts for free. They appear to be will to spend some treasure to push for TB, but if it is TB + something else, more than likely the will charge for the something else. Even if costs go up $20 the increase would be $100 since all prices "have to" end in 99. Frankly, the Mac Pro is glariing deficient on USB 3.0 also. So there isn't much of cost savings from other components that is going to be left over to "pay for" TB infrastructure + other stuff because not align with TB design assumptions.
Integrated graphics has little to do with this. TB essentially assumes that there is embedded (not to be removed and comes with every device) graphics. Whether that is a discrete (separate chip and VRAM) or integrated ( use main RAM ) implementation is immaterial. The side effect of integrated graphics into the Xeon is making the "additional cost " disappear , not any technical requirement.
Furthermore, you can not route DisplayPort protocols unless you create them in the first place. There has to be a source. A pipe-to-nowhere doesn't have alot of utility. Frankly, it also violates your uniform interface property also if the computer doesn't have DP stream(s) coming out of what is essentially a DisplayPort connector. That is probably part of the deal that Intel worked out with the DisplayPort folks. Always push display data out of every computer.
For a Mac Pro having two DisplayPort output is not a huge benefit. Two or more display outputs have been a staple of Mac Pro level machines for years. Adding a gratuitously more expensive solution to Mac Pros doesn't do them any service. The systems are already at the top of the expensive options. Pushing them higher so that they can be consistent with the lower priced models only endangers the Mac Pro even more.
Apple can add embedded graphics to the Mac Pro, but it if that doesn't also come with a cheaper Mac Pro option then all this is doing long term is kill off the Mac Pro faster.
I never called it a dead form factor, but Apple treats it that way.
No. It is not Apple. The whole PC market is walking away from big boxes with lots of slots. Has been for years. Apple is following where the people are going. Apple is not doing is trying to fight the trend.
Remember the Xserve? They stopped paying attention to it and then just killed it when due for a refresh
They did pay attention to it (it got features added over time. OS/Apps SSD drive
way before any other machine, LOM , etc. ) and they killed it because not enough people were buying it. Growth collapsed and the product got killed. That is exactly what is flawed with pushing Mac Pro prices higher. Higher prices are going to make the value proposition harder which most likely will lead to stunted growth. Stunted growth leads to product death.
. They spend a lot more time taking care of mobile devices because those are their volume sales
It is not about volume it is about growth. No growth potential; no product. There is a volume component in that there is a minimum volume that Apple will mess with. Producing 50,000 machines is not a useful activity for Apple.
but people dropping $2500+ on a stock machine shouldn't just be ignored.
Apple likely makes over $100K per day and about a million a month on the interest on the cash hoard that they have. That is without selling or doing anything. Just roll out of bed in the morning ... boom $100K. All this posturing that Apple should bow and scrape for customers waving $2,500 in their face is humorous. A $25,000 purchase order isn't even a large lever. Should they be nice and engage in business? Yes. Desperate for your $2,500 ? No. Their $2,500 customers are no different than their $250 customers. Not some special Platinum Club, "prime time player" status.
The Mac Pro has gotten updates every year along side the other Mac models. What the Mac Pro hasn't gotten is "dog and pony" shows. That is lack of glitzy spin not added value.
Most people buying these towers buy them for work. This includes the G5 that preceded the Mac Pros.
Many currently field deployed, high disk bandwidth constrained jobs are using eSATA now. What they need is a solution besides the kludge ExpressCard to solve that problem. TB allows them to deploy any of the other Mac laptops instead of just being constrained to the MBP 17" with the storage subsystems they already have if can get hands on reasonably priced TB dock/dongle with eSATA.
There are a few folks who require field deployed >300MB/s streaming capture. The TB solution might work better for them, but I doubt that is a huge market driver.
What are going to see alot of is people doing exactly what Blackmagic has done. For example their intensity product line up.
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/
First there was a PCI-e solution. Then last year there came a USB 3.0 solution. Now there is a TB solution. The TB solution is largely the PCI-e card yanked out and put into a box.
Similarly, the high end storage box solutions appear to be what used to be a bundled PCI-e card + SAS/eSATA box refactored into a box where the PCI-e card is pushed internal to the exterior box.
If this trend expands to go deep into the lower end PCI-e card market that is a catch-22 for the Mac Pro. If the PCI-e card market dries up then the need for Mac Pro will take a large hit. The only way the Mac Pro is going to survive long term is not by duplicating previously unique abilities that have been moved down to the "lower end" models, but by staying out in front of the curve.
In short, there are higher priority things to get added to the next Mac Pro ( USB 3.0 , PCI-e v3.0 , etc) than TB. They can save that till the "next revision" when it is probably less expensive to implement. The Mac Pro is in much more need of differentiation than homogenization right now.
