Not really as I expect anyone who selects this option knows what RAID is an what the different levels mean.
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I have to say that you must really struggle in life given all the choices you have to make. If picking and choosing options is too difficult for you then HP does offer pre-configured systems which you can buy. No need to select your individual components.
I think part of the genius of Steve Jobs was paring the product catalog way back and offering far less choice on mainline systems. If people are given a good/better/best choice studies have found those folks more readily purchase and have higher satisfaction with their selection (theory being that with more selections people focus on what they missed out on and second guess their choices). I think that holds true for the more commodity items. MacBook Air, iMac, even a lot (I'd venture to say the majority) of MacBook Pro customers very likely benefit from that approach. There's probably another study out there somewhere but my also gut tells me it doesn't hold up as well as you venture into the realm of highly knowledgeable users looking for utility to accomplish specific tasks (e.g. "pros"). Someone who reads email, browses the web, authors documents, and uses spreadsheets, no problem. Someone who has specific compute requirements for demanding workflows (film, 3D render, etc...) often has a very specific set of requirements and wants to tailor their tool to the task. My team knows roughly what they need in terms of GPU/CPU/RAM/storage/AIC/etc... to get their job done and often some of those items will be in a much higher level than others; that's where good/better/best breaks down in my opinion.
I'm going to sound like I'm contradicting myself for a moment here though. They still don't necessarily have very specific requirements in terms of individual component parts. I get feedback like "the 18 core systems are working out much better for us than the tens did," and, "32GB is really constraining on memory." I don't get requests like "we need 10TFlops of compute and 67.5GB of available memory for optimum efficiency" or even "I need a W-3265, 128GB @2933, and two Quadra RTX8000s." We may arrive at something like that but my experience has been that people start with what they need to accomplish, compare to reference points they understand, and then back into a set of components that meets the need. No one on my team is telling me they specifically need two Pro Vega IIs, they're comparing their workload on existing hardware and knowing where the bottlenecks are and asking for those areas to be beefed up in the next round of hardware, then we arrive where we do. Whether it's AMD or Nvidia or any specific model of either just doesn't matter to them (although for the small subsection that feels they need CUDA, I get that to an extent but I think beyond brand loyalty that would change for most of them as soon as they had an option to ASICs that do the job better, which will happen, and already it happening - I even highly suspect that "I need CUDA" is more often spouted from gamers that have never touched an ML tool than it is from actual direct users of CUDA).
At the risk of going (further) round and round here, I think most general compute consumers are better off with less choice as unlikely as that sounds but as the level of expertise rises so does the need for flexibility but moreso flexibility in outcome rather than SKU variants. I hope I'm communicating my thoughts well enough to be understood.
PS I find a lot of storage consumers have zero idea what the various RAID levels are and many (perhaps most) think it serves the roll of backup (and are then devastated when they lose an array). I bet you'd find a lot of workstation and NAS buyers who just associated RAID 0 with fast and thus best and don't understand that they lose fault tolerance with the approach.
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Disagree. It will sell less than the 1,1-5,1 Mac Pros.
I agree with you but I think that's just fine. Changing OSes can be a big deal. Investments in time and money on various software solutions far eclipse hardware investments in a lot of situations. Those that went to Windows aren't just going to turn on a dime and come back to MacOS because there's a new system that performs great.
That said, Apple doesn't care if it sells less than 1,1 to 5,1 and shouldn't. A lot of that audience is now served by other Apple products (MBP, iMac Pro, Mac Mini, even standard iMac). A good chunk of those who aren't and are not in the target demographic for the modular Mac Pro aren't Apple's intended audience anyway. People who want to stuff things into an affordable box and string it along for ten years are not the customers Apple is chasing. Cold hard truth. Many of them are venting about moving off of Apple, that's fine, Apple won't miss them.
