Is the new MacPro worth $3,000?

    Although I have not personally seen the new black-cylinder MacPro, I suspect many will be taken aback by its small size.  Measuring 9.9 inches in height by 6.6 inches in width, it will be very similar in size to the old Apple Cube computer (10 x 7)  which briefly sold between 2000 and 2001; it is as tall as a high end memory stick is wide.  The Black Mac has a roughly similar design to the Cube, with its top ventilation and general lack of expandable internal storage space.  Given that the cube sold only for 2 years, there might be another parallelism: the new MacPro's sales longevity is yet to be determined. 

    Paying $2,000 or $3,000 is a lot of money for ANYTHING; you could use that amount of money to buy a cheap used car, contribute to a downpayment on your first home purchase, substantially pay down your college loans, or--for the more eccentric--travel around the world.   I ended buying my first MacPro (refurbished) in 2005 simply because it had the requires specs to process the large number of videos that ICTAL was going through at the time.  Although it only had 2 hard drive slots, which were very hard to get to, there were a number of 'do-it-yourself' solutions in order to expand its capability.  When Steve Jobs presented the easy to reach four bay models, there must have been a number of persons besides myself to have been elated.  The old gray MacPro had good ventilation, keeping the drives in a cool state; anyone who has ever tried to process video with single bay external drives will quickly see how easily drives "break' from the heat generated.   During this period, the average hard drive size also increased as prices dropped. My first drive, a 160 GB unit, eventually evolved to 2 TB units, to my happy astonishment--an experience most of you also share.

    Another feature which allowed customers to accept the fact that they were paying 'an arm and a leg' for their computers might have been the simple fact that the MacPro was so damn big and heavy.  There are many advantages of this size and weight, covered in prior articles.  Yet one implicit benefit not previously mentioned is simply that it helped give the device the sense that the price was well worth it: 'indestructible' and 'solid', one simply did not get the sense of being 'ripped off' by the company.  Given the equal solidity and stability of the operating system, it was generally viewed as an item of high value that was 'worth it'; the only issue was simply whether you could raise or save $2,000 to $3,000 needed for the purchase.  Its value was never in question, but merely the purchasing power of the consumer.

    This might not be the case with the new black cylinder MacPro.

    The new MacPro is so small and light that it could be easily stolen and placed into a backpack without raising much suspicion in the process.  Apple is placing its bet that he new MacPro will simply be the hub of a much larger office framework, possibly including multiple NASes.   By focusing its attention on 'speed' and 'power' Apple hopes that individual home's computing ecosystem will not be so negatively affected by the elimination of the internal bays in the old MacPro.  It is in part a recognition of the new and evolving suburban computing ecosystems that are arising; the new MacPro is simply an recognition of this fact, one might argue--specially the case for those who could afford to buy a MacPro in the first place.

    Yet, just yet, it could also be an effort by the company towards more noxious ends: increase the user base dependency on its iCloud solutions, basically turning isolated computing environments that were the old PCs into machines that cannot be used without first connecting back to the iCloud Apple home: an Orwellian view of computer users.  This would imply that the user would need to have the new MacPro connected to the internet all of the time in order to be able to use it--something as foreign to traditional PCs as the internet was at the end of the 1980s.   In this view, you would 'entrust' ALL OF YOUR PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL DATA  to Apple company, if correct, given the sheer lack of space in the new MacPros.  "Trust us"; "we have done nothing wrong" Apple seems to be telling us.  Whatever the case might be, it is certainly the fact that with the Edward Snowden fiasco, users will be very disinclined to so naively accept this implicit proposition from the company.

    The new black cylinder MacPro might be more like the old Apple Cube than is apparent at first hand.