With iMac thunderbolt. it made some entry-mac pro user distress to bought it.
Distressed or bought the right product ? There has been a set of people who bought the wrong product, the Mac Pro. That is one reason why there is almost constant complaining about the Mac Pro price. It is the wrong product for those people because it doesn't meet their budget constraints or workload needs.
A fraction of the "I need a minitower" folks can now by an iMac and have their needs met in the price range they are constrained to. Multiple monitors and about one decent PCI-e slot worth of I/O.
but today rather than that we have "nearly expandability" of the pro in iMac too.
Yes and no. There is a wider variety of things you can connect to the iMac but if what the user needs is bandwidth and expandability there is gap.
Thunderbolt isn't great bandwidth if look at the bandwidth of the current Mac Pro's PCI-e slots. It is even worse in comparison to a Mac Pro with Xeon E5 ( PCI-e v3.0 which doubles the throughput. )
The E5 also have higher memory I/O ( to/from RAM and the L3 caches).
TB moves older protocols: DisplayPort 1.1a when 1.2 is current and PCI-e v2.0 when v3.0 is about to be current.
First, The line-up of next mac pro features dual processor on every model and bring up the price (at ~$3000), leave SP as BTO (discount at $3-400). this option will made the big gap of performance (and price too.) between based mac pro and high-end iMac (as 8 vs 4-Core).
Second, Same price but bring Hex-core (or 4-Core with 2nd SSD Standard) to base configuration. to made a performance gap.
Thirds, Quad as base configure but drop down the price to match i7 iMac ($2199). Some user will see an iMac as a mac pro with free 27" Thunderbolt Display.
There is a performance gap just by using an E5 instead of a mainstream core i7. You are not going to see it with some synthetic benchmark that is so small it fits in the L3 cache of both though. If get down to measuring real multithread I/O horsepower there is a gap. A large one.
Pointing at core or GHz numbers is myopic. The performance of the top end BTO iMac is going to be close to the low end Mac Pro because they are relatively close in price. There is not going to be some huge gulf between them. All the Mac Pro has to be is "faster' which a 0.2GHz gap will provide.
SSDs "standard" are only going to jack up the price too high. $3,000 can't be the base price of the Mac Pro. That is just wrong. If willing to sell a machine at a lower price then that is the base. All the options in any BTO store should move the base price up. You don't hide your lower prices inside some knobs in the store. You post them clearly so that folks with a budget don't walk past your store thinking there is nothing to buy.
If anything the Mac Pro needs to "take back" the $2,099-2,999 price range from the iMac; not give it up completely. Giving it up completely would be the death of the Mac Pro. That is exactly where the XServe was..... it is dead.
To get down to $2,199 the Mac Pro would require the E5 1620 to be priced just as low as the former Xeon 3x20 models ( ~$260) and strip down a number of components. So a 4x1GB RAM , a smallish HDD , no optical , entry video card , etc. Something like $2,299 or $2,399 is more likely. Some movement down would be a start.
The prices for these Thunderbolt PCI-e card expansion boxes haven't really been posted. If these are $200-300 then the Mac Pro is going to be a better deal if Apple can close the gap by at least that much. Instead of one or two slots PCI-e v2.0 which saturate your TB data throughput, you get 4 PCI-e v3.0 slots (with twice the bandwidth).
Most users aren't going to have large need for TB on a Mac Pro when have higher bandwidth in the form of PCI-e cards.
