but from the information we have thus far I anticipate it won't be like the Mac Pro we all know and love. It will be a some sort of hybrid, a mix of iMac and Mac Mini with "PRO" attached to it. Or it could be a rack mount type of design.
New AMD 7000 series and Nvidia K5000 GPU PCI-e cards information leads to Mini and iMac designs being more plausible? Not really.
...but the way Apple now does things and their direction is proof that the days of expanding our machines is slowly coming to a close.
Removing ODDs, one of the most consistent trend right now across the Mac line up, has very little to do with expansion. The other major trend right now is Thunderbolt. To position that Thunderbolt is
not about expansion is more that just a little dubious.
The mini is about as tall, wide and deep as it has been for the product's lifetime. The iMac is about as tall, wide , and deep as it has been for these respective screen sizes. Yes laptops are on track for thinner and lighter but all competitive laptops are on that track. If not on that track the "attack of the killer tablets" will eat them alive over time. "Killer tablets" aren't a major threat to the workstation market right now so that is non factor in making them more competitive with other offerings in the workstation space.
Those 2tb 3.5 inch drives are interesting. If its a sealed box, time to get the torches and pitchforks out
If there are multiple PCI-e slots then it won't be a sealed box. If Apple is drinking gallons of Thunderbolt kool-aid then there will be no slots. But why the new cards and drivers? Better still why give up the massive increase in performance in I/O and/or computation (enough to swamp Thunderbolt bandwidths) by being able to add cards of that class? Are the TB kool-aid dispensing inmates running the asylum now? Is Apple really that technologically clueless? Right now the major differentiating performance gains in the workstation market come through PCI-e cards.
Apple could add Thunderbolt to the Mac Pro without taking away the PCI-e slots. It can easily be in compliance with the "all Macs must have TB " with zero number of PCI-e slots going away. There would likely be a GPU embedded on the motherboard but against that doesn't mean there can't be PCI-e slots.
In the big picture I can only see two possibilities for this Mac Pro delay:
1) Apple is waiting to release a new Mac Pro that can push out enough pixels to a desktop retina display. The parts are not ready or satisfactory enough for Apple yet.
Retina has two factors. pixel ppi and distances from the eyes. In most detached monitor situations moving the monitor back a inch or two is a far more cost effective way of achieving "Retina" than massively increasing the ppi.
For a laptop the keyboard is attached so the distance is limited. For a phone/ipad limited by arm length, eyesight (due to smallness) , and/or lap distance to prop it on. None of that has any significant connection to desktop configurations.
There are no Retina iMacs. The upcoming TB docking station ( Display) is likely to exactly mimic the current iMacs. Exactly the same ppi due to the above factors. The likely upcoming TB docking station is delayed for exactly the same reasons the iMac was delayed. If Apple coupled the Mac Pro release to the revised docking station release that was a bozo move. But I can see them as making that kind of bozo move.
There is lots of hand waving wishing for relatively cheap 4K monitors. Not going to happen any time soon.
2) Apple is allowing the market for the Mac Pro to slowly realize the Mac Pro isn't necessary (not true but Apple is abandoning the highest end of the market).
It is far more likely the many segments of the market realized that for their own workloads long before Apple did. There are some "head in the sand" folks that haven't caught the overall market trends, but Apple isn't way out in front of the curve here. In fact this have been the relative norm over the last 60+ years of electronic computers for workloads to gradually move to smaller machines over time. Some stay but the overall the expansion is largely on the smaller end where new "smaller" products appear over time.
Apple is not going to make another Mac Pro. The next Professional grade Mac that Cook referred to is going to be a retina iMac released later this year.
"Retina", or not, wouldn't make an iMac "professional". It also would have been absolutely horribly bad expectation management if when repeatively asked about the Mac Pro and respond going to have something new in 2013 to not deliver a Mac Pro. Don't confuse restrictions on Apple's ability to specifically name a product as a likely indicator that they are engaging in misdirection. It is vague because a vague, indirection reference to a product is all that they can name and still be in compliance with the directive.
If Apple eventually goes "iMac Pro" (perhaps a refinement on HP Z1 concept) that is really only a move to "save' the entry level customers from the Mac Pro and fold those into the iMac customer pool. If they drop the Mac Pro it is because the market of folks who want to buy a Mac Pro on a regular basis has shrunk so far as to make it non-viable as a growth market. Whether there is on going Mac Pro depends far more upon what customers do next than on what Apple does next (well after they actually deliver something new. ). There are two sides to this.
