I may have a poor understanding of the mechanisms involved but it doesn’t seem immediately obvious why unified memory should hold back the implementation of high bandwidth PCI-E. Except of course if they just haven’t consciously designed their processors with enough PCI-E capability

The only issue I see is their lack of support for video cards integrating their output into the thunderbolt ports. Which is a problem they pretty much solved in the last Mac Pro with their MPX extension to PCI-E, which conveniently provided additional power and allowed the injection of displayport signal into the thunderbolt outputs.

All of the problems with the Mac Pro are theoretically solvable. They could even add expandable memory if they really wanted to. But since the Mac Studio is so ridiculously fast, why bother? The number of people who are going to be held back by the Mac Studio is a minuscule market not worth serving, they would never make a profit on it, and ultimately Apple is a business not a charity.

The Mac Pro is Apple saying: “if you need more than 192GB of RAM, we can’t help. But if you need PCI-E, we have a lot of old Mac Pro enclosures left over from the past 3 years when we didn’t sell any Intel Mac Pros, here’s a Mac Studio in a bigger box, enjoy”

I completely agree - a computer like any system is a series of design choices, compromises and decisions. Apple's vision of the Mac appears to be of a small, svelte and powerful system with limited extensibility. These are the systems of which they sell the most.

Regarding socketable memory - I believe that their current memory setup is significantly faster than any system with socketed memory. Given that they market the memory bandwidth heavily in their specs I imagine this would lead to a perceived performance drop for what is essentially their most expensive system.

My one gripe with the new pro is that they have reintroduced a problem they themselves solved, because they chose to not support discrete GPUs. MPX looks like a really neat solution to both internal system cable management, and the routing of thunderbolt and display data through the system. It's a shame it only existed in one generation of one product

Interestingly enough from looking at pictures of the new system board - they have less power cable connectors than the 2019. Is the new system using a smaller capacity PSU than the old?

I think that is enough. Sometimes I want everything in one box. To be able to spec a computer with the expansion peripherals on the inside is very convenient.

Especially for media studios with lots of data to digest. They eat all of these PCI slots up probably.

They probably gonna kit whole studios out with these things.

The author of this Verge article had the same assumption, but couldn't find anyone in the VFX or video production business who uses Mac Pros like this.

The reasons given by the studio people interviewed make sense. They get a lot more graphics bang for the buck with Nvidia-equipped PCs, and they can upgrade piecemeal.

Additionally for video pros, they were burned by Apple's consumer-oriented FCP X product overhaul over a decade ago and the mistrust still lingers:

'And while Apple’s decision to overhaul Final Cut Pro was over a decade ago, studios still haven’t forgotten. Almost all of the video professionals I spoke to brought it up. “Every filmmaker in the world was using this,” Lebensfeld complained. “And they lost that whole market. They just don’t take it seriously.”

'“They really did screw us over on that,” Ford, the documentarian, agreed. “I was really upset.”

'I searched high and low and ended up connecting with over 20 professionals for this story in order to locate someone who enthusiastically wanted to buy the Mac Pro. I found exactly one: Drofa. He loves the cheese-grater design.

'“The killer feature is when somebody comes and says, ‘Okay, you have a Mac Pro,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I can make a cheesesteak,’” he explained.'

They didn't talk to me.