Despite being a massive Apple fan, from the perspective of someone working in video/media editing and postproduction - the "iBin" Mac Pro was everything the core target market of Mac Pro's never wanted from workstation:
- we asked for more internal storage, instead Apple gave us, literally, no internal storage options bar small primary drive.
- we asked for faster, newer, stronger CUDA cards, instead Apple made sure you won't be able to fit Nvidia in there, ever. And I'm sorry but OpenCL is just a joke in comparison.
- we asked for better onboard audio, instead they moved that single basic headphone mini jack, to the back, why not.
- we asked for lower entry price point, wider CPU scalability for cluster machines. Instead they made sure nMP was twice more expensive, and narrowed the options to single CPU
- we asked for more PCIe slots and buses for all of our raids, capture cards and controller boards, instead they proposed that we throw away all of the cards and arrays we invested in over the years into rubbish bin and start from scratch, with external chains of devices on £30 cables.
- we asked for better compatibility with existing hardware on the market, so we can upgrade things every few years, instead they made sure all internals were as proprietary as possible.
- we asked to redesign the new MP better, so it mounts into racks, simply so the rendering and encoding clusters don't litter every table in the office and require custom rigs in broadcast trailers. Instead Apple made sure we'll never have them under our desks, we can never stack them up, and it will be next to impossible to take them on the road without ratchet straps. Plus from now on everything that usually was inside will now be dangling off it on cables.
And the list goes on forever.
So yes, from technology point of view - the nMP is pretty and it's a marvel of design. But in the same time - who is the "Pro" in Mac Pro? Who is the target customer? Who is this mythical processor power hungry, number crunching end user that doesn't need tons of storage and ef loads of cards inside? Not editor, not video encoder, not musician, not sound engineer, not special effects guy. Who are these aesthetics conscious Brabantia collectors with need for neat, shiny round objects on their desks if it comes at the cost of spider web of massively expensive and ugly Lacies, Bufallos, Arecas and Pegasus', break out boxes, external disk writers, card readers, thunderbolt to whathaveyou adapters and TB->PCIe IO bays littering every inch of their work space? Kitchen designers? Feng Shui coaches?
Let's call it for what it is - the "iBin" is yet another massive middle finger to media industry (the industry that made Apple and almost single handedly helped it survive pre-intel times). It's a bigger middle finger than FCP7->FCPX and Aperture->Photo transition combined. It's a middle finger with "rage guy" meme and "FUUUUU" sound added.
Jokes aside - the worst part is that introduction of "iBin" didn't have to kill Mac Pro. There was enough market space between Mac Mini and Mac Pro to have a space agey desk objects introduced for Professional Funny Cat Video Vloggers or Real Estate Agents, or whatever "Pro" market this thing was designed for. It still doesn't have to. Call the old shape MP something like Mac Pro Classic, add new Xeon range, regular thunderbolt 2 motherboard with two buses and bring it back. Two physical CPUs and all. Done. Sorted.
