Their justification for the form factor, when it was released, was that pro users need various PCI cards to interface with some of their equipment, and this would allow them to do that.
It seemed like the guts of the Mac Pro were essentially shoved inside of a box and stuck in the corner of the tower. It would seem like they could decouple it and sell a box that pro users could load cards into (like other companies do for eGPUs). It wouldn’t feel like a very Apple-like setup, but it would function and allow Apple to focus where they want to focus without simply leaving those users behind.
I suppose the other option would be to dispense with the smoke and mirrors and let people slot a Mac Studio right into the Mac Pro tower, so it could be upgraded independently of the tower.
The alternative is people leave the platform or end up with a bunch of Thunderbolt spaghetti. Neither of which seem ideal.
It was always strange the Apple Silicon kept the 1.3kw power supply which was massive overkill.
I always hoped we’d get a consumer version of what they have internally - 10 or 20 or more Apple Silicon chips for 1000 cores or so.
A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".
A lot of Apples offerings feel a bit like that actually.
To be expected when lord of the supply chain Tim Cook is running the show.
Apple doesn’t end up with a lot of parts in warehouses because they control the supply chain so well.