Exactly. Bragging about how they didn't add a mm to the iMac to make it "pro", and that it's art, is as clear an indication as we'll get that Apple has forgotten why we power users buy their machines. It's to get a job done, not to be an exhibit in the MoMA. The latter is fine only as long as it doesn't impede the former.

I'm not in the target market for this, but I wouldn't buy a desktop that doesn't support a spinning hard drive. Unless Apple offers a 6TB SSD standard.

Apple is a hardware company. They make their money by selling computers.

(Less true these days thanks to the app store 30% top-slice, but it's in their DNA ...)

To the extent that there's demand for high-performance workstation-grade Macs, this will relieve the pressure on that market to migrate away from the increasingly aging dead-end of the current Mac Pro.

To the extent that, Moore's Law having ended, there's less incentive to upgrade regularly, having a less-expandable Pro Mac will give Apple more opportunities to entice power users to upgrade (by, for example, rolling a new iMac Pro every 18-24 months with an improved display panel or some other must-have feature: if you buy a pro machine you spend a lot of time staring at that screen, so a better display option is an obvious upgrade draw).

A Pro machine with external monitors can't force an upgrade the same way as an all-in-one machine. If they roll out a lease-purchase arrangement similar to the iPhone Upgrade Program, this could drive sign-ups, pushing power users away from buying a maxed-out tower once every five years or so towards subscribing to the new maxed-out-closed-box-every-year club.

> A Pro machine with external monitors can't force an upgrade the same way as an all-in-one machine.

Trashcan MacPro user here. I would have happily purchased a new one with Thunderbolt 3 and an semi-up-to-date Nvidia card (OR external GPU support), if they had actually updated the Pro when Thunderbolt 3 became a thing. Instead they just let it die.

Cynical though your thinking may be (and I intend this as the highest form of compliment), I suspect that your argument is at least partially accurate. Reducing computers to integrated all-in-one appliances certainly marshals pressures towards a heightened hardware refresh cycle. I personally prefer upgrading individual components frequently (including screens) and the whole system on a three/four year cycle.

> Apple is a hardware company. They make their money by selling computers.

Also phones, I hear, are big for them. And music. And payment processing.

The Thunderbolt 3 ports are each somewhere in the neighborhood of the bandwidth of a PCIe 8x slot, arguably giving this about the approximately the expandability of an HP or Dell single socket workstation.

I'm not saying this should be preferred to a traditional tower, just that it isn't fair to say it has no expandability.

I'm of the internal-cards over external-cables school of thought. I've been plugging circuit boards into backplanes since the S-100 bus era, and I'm very much committed to the idea of a discrete computer chassis containing all the major computing components as a distinct entity compared to the screen. I still have desktop machines because of this.

Thunderbolt 3 ports are closer to PCIe 3.0 x4, not x8. Regardless it won't cause a huge performance hit depending on your workload (about 5-10% slower in gaming benchmarks). But YMMV with applications that require more bandwidth.

I mean, the Trashcan Mac Pro had Thunderbolt expandability too. But that doesn't seem to have been as much as people were hoping for then.

which then need 2-500 chassis, or overpriced RAID arrays to do anything useful with...