Did a little analysis at the Apple store today. A COST/BENEFIT analysis.
I found out that I could buy a MacPro for 12 grand and get 12 cores in the CPU. That Mac was loaded with an 8TB RAID. $13,000 bucks with a display. That will keep ONE person busy.
I found that I could instead with that $13000 buy 6 top of the line iMACs @ $2000/ea with each monitor equipped machine having its own graphics processor (6970) which twice as fast as the MacPro GPU, and EACH iMAC with a Quadcore processor, for a total of 24 cores, and 2 TB drive each (total of 12 TB). I could as a small business man keep SIX people busy with those machines, and when anyone of them had to RENDER, they would all have the QMASTER software going to spread that task and share all those 24 cores amongst each other. I would also have a 12 TB thunderbolt Pegasus RAID off one of those machines and share that among the group. Total of 24TB storage for 6 people. Total of 24 real cores shared via Qmaster. Everyone has a nice 27" 2560 x 1440 resolution screen.
For 13 thousand dollars. Integrated Qmaster node system. Twice as many cores. Twice as fast GPU.
Or, with MacPros I could spend that for one and keep one person busy. Which scenario gets more work done?
Has Apple abandoned the pros? I think not. The "prosumer" (so-called by some in the professional community) hardware is actually faster than what much of the professionals are now using. I think this is good for all of society.
So even with these prosumer offerings, Apple has not abandoned professionals, not if these computers are actually faster than current technology, and they are. But when Apple comes out with the rumored rack mount new Mac Pro the speeds will only jump, and then all worries of abandonment should be completely allayed. Here's the link to the "rumor" by inside sources:
http://9to5mac.com/2012/02/14/report-apple-to-return-to-nvidia-for-mac-pro-graphics-in-nehalem-update/
