Apple's rigidity on sticking to the road map has really been hurting the Mac Pro. At some point they should have said "fuck it" and at least put something new in them.
The fact that they haven't done a drastic price cut is extra salt on the wound. I really figured they would put some effort in to the Mac Pro after they went through all the trouble of a fairly sophisticated redesign.
Going into the redesign people were already pissed at how long in tooth the tower was and they had a lot of convincing when they dropped such a radical redesign which pretty much told pro users that expansion from here on out was gonna be Thunderbolt or nothing.
While the TB interface is amazing, the products that use it are few and far between and the markup can be really steep. Hardly a home run for people who already felt ignored and had to buy new shit. But whatever I put up with it, I mean yes anything Thunderbolt is a ripoff but I figured Apple was gonna really exert some pressure since it was finally in the whole line. I'd suck it up for a real external solution that could supercharge docking and expansion.
As it stands today nothing much has improved on the affordability or availability of TB expansion or really much of anything at all. But on top of giving people a machine that forced them to conform to a whole new expansion paradigm after years of ignoring them, then they have the balls to not update the fucker for almost 3 years. I know Intel hasn't always been there, but that's hardly an excuse when price should have been lowered or if not then some GPU, memory, and storage bumps.
How they/Intel have managed to bungle Thunderbolt worse than Firewire is beyond me. Such a missed opportunity and one that has made the Mac Pro a hard piece of kit to recommend.
