Does Apple have a gun to your head?
In the end, Apple is banking on guys like me ("prosumer" who just wants everything to run a bit faster in a slick package) to pick up the slack for the disgruntled/abandoned "Pro" users.
But there is a BIG caveat...if they don't price it right then guys like me melt away, the "Pros" don't bite, and the whole thing becomes an epic fail. Guess we'll see tomorrow
I know who they're banking on. Unfortunately it's the wrong crowd. They're betting on a much more fickle demographic then they're accounting for.
That said, there was a review done recently of a Thunderbolt to multiple PCIe card enclosure. It shows that while it can be done in terms of form factor, it has some pretty severe limitations attached to it. Specifically in that review, literally cutting in half the capabilities of the Fusion IO PCIe SSD, so much so that it lost nearly 40% of it's usability when writing files for HD video production/streaming. You can imagine that putting a GPU in there would result in more severe limitations, as well as insufficient heat dissipation for anything but an entry to mid level GPU. And it's expensive at $900 by itself.
Apple might have better luck in overall sales figures by just making an OS X that will legitimately boot on PC hardware (UEFI only obviously) and getting their money there and from the iDevices. It's clearly not designing machines users want to keep (or can keep) running for years anymore.
The only way the prosumer group, which I'm also a part of, is going to go for the TrashCan Pro is if they put out a really good model comparable to what a 2010/12 MP can do at >3 GHz clock speed for less than $3k. If they can't do that, they can kiss a lot more customers goodbye than they'll gain.
