[Andrew Richards] "You've just made the case to cancel the Mac Pro. If no one needs something more powerful (and necessarily more expensive) than a single processor, then the top end iMac is all anyone needs. "
I'm not sure we're quite there yet, and in any event CPU isn't the only compelling advantage of the Mac Pro -- internal expansion (particularly PCIe slots) is also important. (Though that probably won't be true if Intel's plans to ramp 100 Gb/s Thunderbolt pan out.)
[Andrew Richards] "Isn't the demographic for the Mac Pro the professional Mac user who really needs the most computing power they can reasonably stuff into a mass-market box? "
I think the issue is that at some point, as CPU performance keeps increasing, dual socket towers won't be any more "mass-market" than refrigerator-sized computers are today.
[Andrew Richards] "For decades, we've been able to do things with lesser boxes that used to take bleeding edge rigs only a few years earlier. What makes 2012 the year that our expectations plateau?"
I'm not sure it is 2012, but I don't think it's that far off. The market keeps shrinking. It used to be that practically every profssional Photoshop user had a compelling need to buy a high-end tower; now 2D bitmap editing just isn't demanding enough for most of them to bother. Offline video editing has also basically followed this path, and online editing/color grading are going to follow shortly. When you can grade 4K in real-time on a laptop (probably within five years), how many people in our market will still care about owning a dual socket tower?
--
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