goMac, bookemdano, and crjackson2134...you all make good points, and I feel like you all are right! This renaissance for the cMP is pretty astounding when you consider 2 things:
1. Apple absolutely, positively hates to acknowledge the very existence of anything that it has consigned to the dustbin of history in its design world. Once they've come up w/ the Next Great Thing, the Old Great Thing might as well have never been created in the universe in the first place. My mental image of Apple after, say, the nMP replaced the cMP is of someone w/ his fingers in his ears, stamping his feet and yelling, "No! No! No!" if you mentioned that there was such a thing as cMP.
2. Apple does NOT want to give you any choice/option that is outside what THEY deem to be a good choice FOR YOU. An NVMe M.2 SSD on a PCIe adapter card in a cMP as a boot drive is about as far away as I could envision Apple wanting to offer you as a choice in your hardware configuration. They march so much to the beat of their own drummer that even their M.2-ish SSDs have proprietary connectors (...imagine if they did that w/ hard drives in place of SATA connectors!).
...yet somehow, for some reason, they added NVMe support. I ain't complaining, but it really gets the mind going to try to figure out WHY they might have done that. Or all of the other updating this year. But especially NVMe...
Exactly! The motivation is marginal at best. Maybe they've got one guy working on this, and he's gotten on a roll, with a bunch of coworkers now crowding around him, yelling "Go, Eddie, go, Eddie, goooo!!!"
Yes! Ignored indeed! Fingers-in-the-ears ignored... And extremely out of character, especially given that choice/option thing in my point #2.
I think you're both right. I think crjackson is right literally, while goMac is right figuratively. Basically, the Mac Pro (or any "Pro" Apple product in the last several years) has been seriously ignored for years. So essentially or practically "unsupported." The nMP is now 5 years old in design, with absolutely zero changes along the way, and the cMP was WAY less important than that to Apple. So to get all of this firmware and GPU love for cMP this year is quite odd to me. Makes me wonder if either (a) they really want the vocal fans of the Mac Pro platform, whom they're ostensively building MP7,1 for, to know that they've done an about-face and care about the platform again; or (b) they're using it to help test some things out for MP7,1, like tsialex and h98 and others have speculated.
Would be fun to know, but whatever the reason, I'll take it!