if it weren't for the fact that 3rd party manufactures already sell plenty of apple parts and profit off them.. i'd tend to believe you.
The only example you've given are Lightning products, which have a market of millions of potential buyers which isn't really comparable as these can be produced in volume for profit. 3rd party manufacturers make SSD blades for Mac laptops and iMacs because they're relatively common Macs, even so these products aren't exactly inexpensive, as the profit margins are a lot lower than selling to the iOS crowd.
But the Mac Pro is a different beast; the SSD may well get 3rd party manufacturers, especially if it turns out to be the same connection used in other future macs, and because it may be possible to manufacture it the same basic way as for laptop blades, just with the different connector.
But the GPUs? The number of extra GPUs produced with Mac compatibility for the workstation Mac Pros is tiny, and many people in fact rely on regular PC cards with some kind of known compatibility, or that can be flashed to add compatibility. But at least with the traditional workstation Mac Pros we're talking about GPUs that are fundamentally the same as their PC counterparts, usually just with altered output ports and/or Mac specific drivers/firmware, i.e - comparatively easy to change pieces, which makes them affordable to produce (even so, Mac specific GPUs have always costed more).
For the new Mac Pro it's a fully custom graphics card form factor, with custom cooling and a custom connector. That's a massive barrier to entry for a company to leap across before they can even consider producing a card for the new Mac Pro. And what products do you envision? Workstation class GPUs might be able to fund development since they typically have huge markup anyway, but then you'd be looking at multi-thousand dollar upgrade for an already expensive computer, to get an upgrade you could probably get just as easily by buying a new Mac Pro for largely the same cost. Let's face it, the move to all Thunderbolt makes it a lot more clear that Apple wants you buying a new machine, and in fact it'll be easy to do that once you've moved everything to Thunderbolt peripherals anyway.
It just doesn't make economic sense for a 3rd party to invest so much in the development of a custom card for the small audience of Mac Pro enthusiasts that want to upgrade their existing Mac Pro, and it makes little sense for Apple to offer upgrades either. This means it's likely we won't see any possibility of upgrades except by buying the next D-series card up from what you already have, but even that's not necessarily viable except perhaps with a D300 to D500 upgrade.
i just wonder how much of a 1000w psu's energy gets translated directly to heat (waste).. how much of it sits idle.. and how much of it's simply an overrating.. anybody else know?
Sure, but by the same token, how many 460w PSU's can drive two high end GPUs plus a 130w CPU? The stock W9000's have a maximum power draw of 375w; we can shave off some for the reduced clock rate of the D700's, and some more for very aggressive binning, but even with a generous reduction to 200w each, to run two of those you're looking at a severely throttled CPU.
If that's the case I'm not personally bothered, as I don't know many workloads where you need both the GPU(s) and CPU to be maxxed out at the same time, but we don't know if that's what Apple is doing since the tech specs only mention the stock power supply for the basic models; we don't know if build-to-order automatically adds a more powerful PSU or not.
It is in fact one of the many things we don't know, but it's another reason why upgrades may not be easy, and are certainly less likely. Either we have a PSU that limits the maximum performance of the system, in which case upgrades are even further limited to only cards that can be made to run more efficiently within the same power restrictions (unlikely to exist IMO as I don't think we'll see enough improvement on that front, not within the next couple of generations of Mac Pro at least by which point there'll be no reason to produce the card).
Either that or the more powerful configurations come with a more powerful PSU, in which case the cost of an upgrade is enough higher, and the work required to do it even more complex, as we have no evidence of direct access to the PSU.
Anyway, this is just more of the same that got the other thread locked. The long and short of it is that while replacements are definitely possible, upgrades
may be possible, but it is far beyond the realm of what can normally be expected of users, and definitely beyond popping a new PCIe card into a workstation Mac Pro both in terms of possible choices (i.e - Apple or nothing) and complexity of installation.
