That's an extremely pessimistic summary, especially given you seem to agree the traditional PC form factor is in decline (along with the PCIe cards that go into them), mobile computing is the future, and this new Mac Pro can share peripherals with that vastly bigger (and growing) mobile market.
I agree that it's in decline, but I'm not sure the Pro market is ready to give up PCIe. What do we use PCIe for? Storage, connectivity, graphics. If the nMP had a ridiculous amount of internal storage and GPU capability, that would be one thing. It is, however, virtually guaranteed that bulky external storage is going to be necessary for almost everybody, and anyone who would benefit from more than dual 7970 is out in the cold. There are definitely a significant portion of the population who would like more than 2 year old graphics technology. Is it more than those with whom the nMP fits the "good enough" criteria? I don't know.
Eventually, a small form-factor like this will be able to have the kind of power where, regardless of other options, it still has a lot of appeal. I do not think we're there yet.
This is all an arbitrary line and we will see where that line actually lies depending on the sales numbers (unless Apple kills the product with a ridiculous price). I do not think we are there yet--the tech is simply not there, desires for more features and speed go beyond or
soon will go beyond what the nMP has to offer.
I think there is or shortly will be a bigger market for 3000MBps SSD drives, the latest GPU technologies, etc. SSD SATA drives dropped something like 60% in price over the course of 1 year (2010, I believe). What happens if PCIe SSDs do the same thing?
One amazing thing about humanity is the capacity for demand. People found a way to utilize more than 512k, drive faster than 25miles per hour, give everyone their own telephone number, etc. The move toward smaller, more portable devices is the compromise of expandability for portability and convenience--but it could only be possible because the marginal utility of expandability has been reduced by how many features and how much power is able to be included in the machine, while at the same time portability is enhanced via smaller size and longer battery life.
When people are buying laptops, they are choosing to trade the expandability, affordability, and speed of a desktop, not give it away for nothing. I'm sure if Laptop users could have twice the speed, upgradability, and capacity for a small dollar cost, they would go for it, no matter what kind of laptop they actually own currently. There are few out there would pass up a product that's 20% better for 1% higher cost (This is 'merica, Gosh Darn it!).
Conversely,
the nMP is not a laptop and is not portable. It has none of the advantages of a laptop, but it does have many of the disadvantages of one. You're using the wonderful example of the market moving towards laptops and then making a false-comparison to the nMP. How much value will users place on the portability of a system they may never actually move Vs the value they placed on power and upgradability? This is not a desktop Vs laptop argument, this is a conventual desktop Vs slightly-smaller-but-equally-non-portable desktop argument. While I'm sure everyone would love to have all the capabilities of their massive "big iron" crammed into a small box for only a small upfront cost, the utility of the small form-factor is clearly
much less for these users than for laptop users, since they have already decided not to go the portable route.
I don't think they're ahead of the game... As I said above they're changing direction and I don't expect anyone to follow. I believe success or failure really comes down to price. If they are reasonable with pricing, I believe this will be far more successful than any previous Mac Pro and for every buyer they lose as a result of the new form factor, they will gain two or three new ones who want a compact headless powerhouse. However, if they price this in the stratosphere, it could very well be the last we see of a workstation class system from Apple as it will not draw new buyers or old.
If Apple is pricing everyone else out of the market, I expect very good results. The 2006 Mac Pro was cheaper than the competition. Heck, if they could put the thing at $1,500, and they managed to create Crossfire over OS X, this could even push into the gaming market. This could be situation where the price is so low, the machine is considered disposable and therefore upgrading is not a huge deal. We agree on this. I am just as in the dark as you are about their pricing, obviously, so I guess we'll just see. I will however point out that PC computer component manufacturers are at razor-thin margins, are extremely competitive, and are probably maxed out on the economy of scale and market efficiency (using todays technology, anyway). It is unlikely that Apple will be able to beat this highly mature and rapidly evolving portion of the economy simply by virtue of being Apple. Has it happened before? Sure, but that was a long time ago.
