I have used, enjoyed, owned, advocated and programmed Macs for ≈25 years. Long story, but now…
In my office I have a Mac Pro. Two biggest advantages: a Mac, and easy to extend. In there sit a number of additional drives (main drive an SSD, of course) and process interface cards (analog and digital I/O) – I am programming various stimulation and data acquisition systems for biosignals (ERG, EEG, …). An excellent machine. Looking forward to equip another lab with this, I was most happy to learn the Mac Pro line would be extended. And what happened? They announce that dustbin, that smokestack, that … whatever, I’m so flabbergasted that I’m out of words in this my non-native language…
I do not see a single positive aspect speaking for that radical redesign, which ends up with a single internal drive, and no way to further extend internally with an industry-standard bus (PCIe or whatever).
Ok, it may be little smaller, but I couldn’t care less about this – there’s plenty space under my desk. But what about all additions? Attach with Thunderbolt? This means additional boxes cluttering my office ground, with cables just waiting to be pulled at most awkward moments, not to mention the ridiculous costs involved. And what about interface cards (here graphic and audio designer will be even more affected), where do I put those? Ok, one can buy external crates, bus extenders, whichever. More boxes, more cabling, more points of failure.
Why was the “old” design not kept? I know no-one in the business who complained about that, given this well ventilated quiet roomy box, wonderfully easy to open, service and extend…
This is so totally, like, damn fully idiotic, what were they thinking? It’s reminiscent of that asinine “hockey puck mouse”, just squared and with much worse consequences!
My interpretation is this: People like me are an uninteresting niche audience for Apple – they go for the masses. Well, if so, may be I won’t go along anymore; not that I would throw out my lovely Air and also 17” MBook along with the bathwater… And Objective-C remains a lovely programming language, which I’m glad I can enjoy now also with Cappuccino (as used in all my new visual phenoma additions).
Addition 2013-08-19: David pointed to this lovely image
http://media2.giga.de/2013/06/Mac-Pro_2013_Mac-Pro_2013.jpg
accompanying that (German) article:
http://www.giga.de/desktops/mac-pro-2013/news/mac-pro-2013-klotz-versus-messie-mac-pic-of-the-day/