I think you're right, my only fear being that Apple will make an affordable ARM beast of a CPU, similar in performance to the threadripper 3990x (64 cores, 128 threads) and make it reasonably priced since they will be producing it. So all of us that buy the Mac Pro will, in this scenario, end up looking a bit foolish for spending so much money
Likely best to do deeper research rather than rely on social media /blog opinions - still, my 2 cents FWIW:
Apple are *never* going to make anything 'reasonably priced' and especially under their self-proclaimed 'pro' moniker. Is a badge for gouging. So ARM or not, the margins will always remain exorbitant (& has been that way for 30 years).
Apple do not make ARM (or pretty much anything of their own really ex. software & [ahem] security). 'Designed in California - made in Sweat Shops?'
'Apple Silicon' will be made by Taiwanese firm TSMC (like much of Apple's gear, my Mac Pro was built in Taiwan by
Quanta Computer). Then there is also much flux in this market & so it remains to be seen exactly how this will play out in the next few years, eg:
Nividia is to buy ARM (hilarious considering the ancient 'banning' of Nvidia by Apple following a long ago war that Apple has even forgotten about 'why' but still holds a grudge). Apple chose not to get into
bidding for ARM & meanwhile Nividia & ARM bought up
all excess capacity at TSMC for next generation CPUs & GPUs.
Point being, we have no idea how ARM will turn out for Apple yet, and especially in terms of being able to replace Intel Xeon CPUs. I'd be inclined to figure on at least four years and also seeing a few generations of that in practice first. For portables and consumer devices, sure.
The MP7,1 in its current form will be around for quite some time I suspect, just like the MP5,1 before it. Only real CPU downside is that the Xeon-W isn't going anywhere & the MoBo socket is very limited. I'd say best we'll see is a bump of the base spec at some point to represent something a little fairer and more sane that the current (silly) base system, eg really crappy GPU, the wrong ram, overpriced proprietary storage, etc.
Of course one always has to be prepared to have very deep pockets to buy MacOS. On balance, I'm happy with my config for the particular work it does (I'm also very happy with my Dell dual Xeon workstation & i7 touchscreen convertible laptop too). But the MP did cost literally twice as much as the (more powerful) Dell.
Quite, cool generally well behaved - except for the mess that is Apple UEFI & T2 management (give me F2 to the BIOS anyday). Stay with the MacPro if that's what you need /would like. It will have the same grunt for years & in terms of running my particular apps - DAWs, music production, NLEs, 4k film production - this performance is quite good and I don't see that ratio changing much in the future unless I went into some new, far more grunty production field (say, VR or Dolby Atmos etc).
