I know you are trying to be sarcastic, but you actually really did not read the old threads. The weight and size of the Mac Pro is complained about on a common basis.---
Typically how the handles cut into hands when lifting them and how removing Mac Pros from users locations to take them back to be repaired and/or deployed is a pain because they are heavy.
Throw on top all the xMac discussions where folks want a smaller ( and therefore presumably less expensive ) Mac Pro. Is this going to be a cheaper box? It probably will not be firmly planted inside the iMac price zone. But were people yelping about smaller and mutating the Mac Pro into something somewhat different? Absolutely. There is gobs of that stuff here on macrumors and other forums. Is this the xMac? No (at least not the "headless iMac with slots" variant of the xMac). It is a substantial mutation that is smaller though.
As for weight and handles; when an MP or several get moved around a lot, the people who do it are not the ones who paid for them .
And the Macs are a fraction of the stuff they have to lug around .
As for the xMac/small tower arguments, which only seem to pop up in MacPro topics; that's people who don't need workstations, and don't know why such a thing even exists .
The MP got targeted, because it's the only Mac that lets you take stuff out easily, and put back in better stuff you can get cheap at Newegg .
Noone ever asked for a smaller MP, maybe a cheaper one; but basically people demanded a Mini , with iMac power, MP design, replacable GPUs, cheap Ram upgrades; and a couple more slots for extra drives or whatever .
Naturally, smaller than an MP, cheaper than the iMac (no screen, right?), no proprietary parts to keep those affordable upgrade options .
It never would have happened ; Apple used to have very affordable towers, with good specs, till '08 .
They could have made a smaller line, but hardly a cheaper one .
Then, after squeezing every available cheap hybrid technology into the iMac and making it really fast, a line of smaller, expandable Mac towers just wasn't going to happen . Remember - this thing had to have iMac performance , and still be upgradable for cheap.
No way to not loose money on such a product, and not hitting the iMac market heavily .
Especially since a few more drive bays and PCIe slots add almost nothing to manufacturing and parts costs , and you can sell it as an MP .
Now what do they get ?
This is not the 'mid-tower' Mac people loved to rave about .
The size is right, and that's where it ends .
No cheap internal upgrades in any department with the new MacPro , for the mid-tower nerds.
All the mid-tower people will say what they always did, and do now - I'll get one !
Most of them won't buy, and never would have .
And not enough space for their iTunes library on the entry model 256GB SSD anyways, that's a deal breaker right there .
Pricing for the base model might or might not be right for the mid-tower crowd ; performance will probably be well below a top level iMac .
Or will it be ?
This is what I find confusing .
I don't believe for a moment Apple saves a dime in parts with the new design, quite the contray . Maybe a little with assembly, probably shipping, packaging and storage .
In the past, a base-mid model MP might not have had great performance out of the box, but could be upgraded instantly, for fairly little cost, and run circles around any iMac . Including storage size and performance .
This time, I think Apple has to offer out-of-the box performance even for the lower models, that easily beats not only the fastest iMac, but any other workstation in their respective price range . By a margin .
If that doesn't happen, the new design might be considered a dud .
It doesn't matter if speeds here or there can go '
up to' this and that .
There are no 3rd party upgrades, apart drom RAM maybe , and Apple upgrades have become affordable in this respect.
There are no basic external expansions that are tested or affordable, and zero more complex external devices to support that part of the design .
Hence, the new approach is a challenge, born into a vacuum for the time being, and has to excel from the start to justify its existence.
So, to cover any ground across the possible spectrum of users, Apple will need to sell as a base modell with a few upgrade options:
- a 6 core CPU (12 threads = max. 9 physical cores in real performance, better than nothing for multi-thread apps), clocked at 3 GHZ or more (for the many 1-2 thread apps) , with 32GB RAM (upgrading later with just 4 sockets too expensive), at least 512GB PCIe SSD (single one doesn't bugger all for performance in a workstation, you just need a little wiggle room re. space ), 4GB VRam (cause they bragged about it) .
I'm to lazy now to calculate this through, but that's a configuration for a revolutionary new workstation design, with the specs of a 4500$ current 6-core including the extras (sans dual GPU), and I expect to pay no more than 3500$ for it .
I don't see Apple doing this; but like I said, I don't see them succeeding if they can't offer significantly more performance (200+% on paper) for the same money, with a design approach that might well be going nowhere (TB) , for all that we know now .
