[LightWing]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

You are buying these high-end machines for performance. If you have spend ~$6k-$10k on a system (the $6k entry system likely makes little sense for many users, with a dinky CPU) why the hell would you be worried about a few hundred dollars more for two TB of super fast PCIe storage. Claiming that is an issues make no sense.

If you are so cost sensitive you will not be looking for a new Apple Mac Pro.

And if you are looking at IO performance not capacity... then the PCIe SSDs totally blows away other options. A large RAID box, with many HDD or several SATA SSDs are required to match the performance of a single little M.2 PCIe/NVMe card. Even for more cost sensitive users the days of HDD are numbered.

HDD still makes sense for *large* asset/NAS systems etc.. HDD sure still makes sense for back-up and especially archive.

So where do you propose the current average Mac Pro user to go? They lose OS support with the release of Catalina. Likely to NEW Mac Minis (no monitor), iMac (BASE are almost as fast as the base Mac Pro, cost $1.7K less AND you get a Monitor), iMac Pros (BASE are faster than the base Mac Pro, cost $1K less AND you get a Monitor) or Mac Pros (no monitor).