True, drivers may be a problem... but a bigger problem than relying on 3rd parties to create a totally new form-factor of each card or relying on Apple to release multiple video card options? Yeah I think not.
You love making up stuff folks never said and railing against it. I made no comment at all about 3rd parties showing up to fill the custom GPU daughtercard market. It is extremely unlikely to happen.
Drivers
are going to be a problem long term. You carefully clipped out the discussion of OS X support. Apple
is going to drop support for older Mac Pros over time. Hardware wise it is in "black and white"
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1752
Software wise only need to note the flurry of angst when the the Mac Pro 2006-7 got dropped for 10.8 (Mountain Lion). When the hardware is dropped the software is going also. The end of the road for the 2008, 2009, and 2010 models is coming too. The "short term" market for 2009-2012 models already got filled in early 2013 with the 10.8.5 updates.
That 3rd parties jump in to fill the gap while Apple was still selling "box with slots" Mac Pro is not particularly surprising at all. That they are probably expecting another year or so of upgrades to trickle in of refurb buyers and a limited number of die-hards to the now legacy form factor? Nope not surprising at all.
Deployed , still in use 2006-2010 models and viable market for new cards and investment are two intersecting but not completely overlapping markets. Over time the bulk of those stagnant models are into stagnant configuration mode (e.g., fixed OS X version). That will largely eliminate them from new drivers and hence new GPU cards.
How's that 5870 working out for you? Keep in mind it is STILL the top video card available as a BTO option in the Mac Pro.
Relevancy? There is a new Mac Pro in 2013. Yes Apple went into a hole. from 2010-2013. In the years previous to 2010, when wasn't the Mac Pro or PowerMac video card not making progress year over year?
You can cherry pick sampling, but it only indicative there is very little substance to what you are flapping your arms about. Sure if Apple goes 2-3 years without updating this Mac Pro base design with new GPUs then the users will be in trouble. If customers buy this new Mac Pro in substantive amounts why would they do that?
This card was released in September 2009 - Four years and counting! Happy 4th birthday!
The current motherboard in Mac Pro being sold today was designed in 2008. Your point? The card is circa with the associated hardware in the current Mac Pro. There is a coupling here even if you refuse to see it.
You want to talk about small markets. The number of Old Mac Pros out there will outnumber the new Mac Pros for a very long time, and just look at the plethora of options Apple has laid out for us!
Apple only and Apple + 3rd Party isn't particularly much different if normalized against the size/diversity of the general PC market. It isn't what Apple has done over time that is the primary issue you are trying to distract from. It is what the 3rd party vendors have done over time. The 3rd party vendor participation rate has always been low. It never did crank into a broad market. That is exactly why the homespun "flash"/"tweaked" card market sprung up for the Mac Pro. That market was
not the sign of a healthy 3rd party market. If that isn't working why continue to go through the Sisyphean effort ?
The waiting primary reward awaiting any 3rd party who jumps into that stagnant market is a bunch of folks who are going to pinch the ROMs the vendor invested R&D money into and squeeze that vendor out of GPU cards sales.
This is also assuming Apple doesn't abandon the iTube form-factor before they update the video cards.
It is highly doubtful Apple created this to abandon it. If nobody buys then perhaps. If about just as many buy this as the old version I doubt they will abandon it. Even if this dies Apple is extremely likely not going to bring the old box-with-slots back. That wasn't a success either. It isn't like Apple "pulled the plug" on a major best seller model. It will go into the same pile as printers , XServe , XRaid , primary monitors , etc of stuff Apple used to do.
That's quite a lot of faith you're putting into this product lines popularity!
It helps not to be in denial or myopically focused on form over function (step 0: the solution has to be a box-with-slots).
I think Apple has alot more access to Mac Pro user demographics and buying patterns than you do. My "faith" is grounded in an expectation that Apple is proactively looking at both groups of users and at where technology is going over time and aiming the products to where those intersect in the future. That they don't drive Apple by looking in the review mirror constantly.
The rise of GPGPU means dual GPUs make sense over the next 5 years for high performance computational workstations. Kowtowing to Nvidia or AMD fanboy criteria doesn't.
How much R&D are they going to pump into cramming the latest cards into an iTube-sized heat-dissipation-nightmare before they decide to divert that budget into creating a new hockey-puck mouse for their Mac Mini?
Your problem is that you don't have alot facts to back up "heat dissipation nightmare". Apple hasn't come back to the hockey puck mouse in over a decade... why would they now? In fact, Apple has been pushing folks toward trackpads, not mice, for several years now. How detached from reality are you?
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Ouch! I wonder if AMD have what it takes to support it, although given they control the console market now Mantle could very soon be a requirement.
Having the same API on PCs and consoles isn't a requirement now, there is nothing new to make it a requirement going forward. Even more so if this gets restricted to only AMD cards on Windows boxes.
It may cut porting costs for some, but frankly the cost of porting hasn't been a huge inhibitor now. If game revenues crater perhaps but.
The "open" part probably more so has to do with perhaps porting this to Linux and having to interface low level with an open source license at the kernel level and with a open source development team. Not that AMD is primarily inviting in Nvidia , Imagin Tech , Qualcomm and the other GPU vendors.
