deconstruct60, that was a lot info there. Thanks for the explanation.
I also don't see Apple wanting to wage "war" between the Mac Pro and iMac. However, I also don't see a move to just a SP system as necessarily leading to a war. But after you explanation, I agree going to just a SP system would be a bad idea. It would likely lead to too much market fragmentation, without any real tangible upside. Some reduced costs, but like you outline probably too many sacrifices in performance/capabilities to compete.
It would be very interesting to see if the iMac drops in price in the coming years. I suppose it depends on how the industry as a whole continues to mature. It may be that the iGadgets eat in on the low side so much that apple actually starts competing with itself more than it thought it would in the $500-$1000 price range. Granted the mobile and desktop market are very different, but many people still just use desktops for checking email, very basic word processing, and storage of media. So if we do enter this post-PC era (which is certainly over blown, but will be true for some), PCs may have to offer more options on the low end to be price attractive. This maybe increasingly true as newer CPUs/GPUs far exceed the needs of most people, thus allowing for the cheaper versions of them to be used. Then this top of the line i7 iMac (I'm thinking maybe by Haswell) might actually be the odd man out, sitting in this funny spot that is far too fast for most people, but not enough for those that actually do intensive work. At that point, I could see these high GHz/4 core Xeon Mac Pros creeping into the <$2000 range.
