I think this incarnation of the Mac Pro has probably lost a bit of the tinker with it factor. It won't be as easy to do as some models have been. That bothers me but realistically in all the years I've owned G5 and Mac Pros cases I've only installed one card, extra memory, and an internal hard drives. This form factor might be a bigger issue for pros,
@Dennis Thanks for that link it got me up to speed on the info that I missed. I wonder how effective the cooling will be? This idea seems strangely reminiscent of
the Cube
Lost a
bit?
The cooling will be more effective than the current Pro, but then the current Pro is no better than a consumer-grade / light-business Windows machine in terms of the effectiveness of cooling - the 'actually pro' workstations from HP and even Dell moves more air in a more noise-efficient manner, especially on the HP.
So I guess it means we can expect cooling to be somewhat on a par with e.g. the midrange Dell Precisions with less noise (though likely probably not that different noisewise to a liquid-cooled HP - who, unlike Apple, can build
that without it leaking).
However, this is negated by the need for external boxen for anything else - take a Pegasus R6 for example, that will already pretty much obliterate the running noise of an HP workstation by itself.
Also I know that the prospect of being able to replace the GPU has been something of a joke for a while on the Pro, and I guess by presumably making the GPU's proprietary or MXM fit, they've pretty much admitted that you're never likely to swap the GPU within the 'Apple-designed' lifetime of the unit.
No doubt Apple-only users will normalise to the experience, but as some of the above posters have said, it means the Pro is only "Pro" for people who think they're the be-all of "pros" who solely edit video in air-conditioned suites.