Yes I realize that. And they also cut costs in every other department. Single CPU, no SATA, no expensive case, no drive cage - backplane - or sliders, half sized PSU, completely gone is the main-board all together,
The mainboard is still logically there. It is about as serviable as it was in the current one effectively much larger now. There are probably 4 boards that hook to complete the logical whole.
The PSU is likely not half sized in terms of output. W9000 cards have a TDP ~250-270W max. Even if Apple's custom thermal design and custom circuitry improves that by 10-20% it is still quite large ( 200-216W * 2 ==> 400-430W ). Throw in the 130W for the CPU and still north of 500W. Still haven't done power for USB 3.0 and TB socket ( those are part time power distribution systems ). There is overhead for the PSU ( 95% PSU at 600W is giving up ~32W in delivered power. Or adding ~34W TDP problem if that is the delivered rating.)
The stuff that got dropped was largely relatively low powered. The second CPU slot was dropped for GPU card that is even higher powered. There is no 50% drop in power requirements.
one forth the number of system fans,
Higher than 1/4 since the GPU cards themselves had fans. Both the fans blowing at/away from the cards and the card fans are gone. The CPU effectively drops its two and you are also forgetting about the Power supply fan.
The diameter is much larger now. Not double/triple size though.
the entire fabrication process has been ultra streamlined for robotic lines, even these magic "fire-pro" cards are coming in without heat-sinks, fans, and other various parts - not to mention the fact that what they showed is basically no longer user serviceable.
No longer serviceable. LOL. Not. There is a slide switch to open the case. There are screws plainly evident on the card retainers. The cards extremely likel plug into a base board since meet at right angles to it. (not many vertically L shaped since logical boards out there when looking at them from the side).
Is there a 3rd party market for replacement parts? No. But that is hardly a definition of serviceable. At least with those not throwing FUD.
They essentially applied iPod logic to the entire MacPro platform;
Really? An iPod has DIMMs slots? An iPod as upgradeable discrete storage ? Not. An iPod has a fan? Not. An iPod has 11 sockets? Not.
make it for as little as possible and sell it for as much as they can.
Because FirePro GPUs and top of the line Xeon E5 v2 are the hallmark of mass affordability. *cough*. Please.
The only deal with that in opposition to your defense of "$6K" is that they can't actually sell it for $6K. If they try to they will lose 75% of their MP customer base with no one out there to replace them.
A completely full crock of male cow droppings. First, the Mac Pro has customers now at $6K prices for 12 core boxes. It is rather hard to imagine that they want have customers for this Mac Pro at roughly the same levels of price for just as many cores (and better overall substantially higher system computational compabilty. The current 12 cores get no where near 3TFOPs let alone 6-7TLFOPs for less than $6K ).
Your are perpetrating a fraud that the exact high end specs that Apple talked about is what is going to be aimed at 75% of the market the new Mac Pro is going to go after. That wasn't the issue. The issue was what Apple did talk about and demo at WWDC. The subset of the aspects of what Apple talked about was the top-end, ultimate BTO Mac Pro. They said and demo nothing about the lower ends.
Will there be lower end. Duh. The iMac has 4 different flavors of GPUs. Over time the MBP lines have typically had at least two. Apple has a long and established multi-year history of shipping 2 GPU systems with multiple configurations with at least a couple GPUs . There is exceedingly little rational reason not to expect them to also do so with the Mac Pro when they merge it with the notion that 2 GPUs standard is the way forward for the next several years worth of iterations.
So either Apple has a line on a super bargain for the remade reformed fire pro cards or they'll have to come up with an alternative to represent the entry level.
Not as much need for super bargin on custom FirePro as just not slap on a higher than necessary margin on top.
Hopefully Apple isn't so stupid as to think they can essentially cut the machine in half and then not only ask full price for it but also raise that price significantly. Even Apple's marketing isn't that good.
If all did was take the $20-80 parts and left the $800-1800 parts in the price isn't going to change much.
What is completely lost in all your handwaving is the relatively expensive parts they took out They did not. In some cases ( 2nd CPU for GPU + 4-6GB VRAM , Thunderbort Port for FW port ) the swapped in part is actually relatively
higher; not lower. So the price isn't going to change radically.
Small doesn't necessarily mean more inexpensive with electronics. That is fundamentally flawed thinking.
