Back in around 2012, when I was working at at consultancy, they had slowly started replacing MacBook Pros for Mac Minis. The case was simple: greatly reduced c

Back in around 2012, when I was working at at consultancy, they had slowly started replacing MacBook Pros for Mac Minis. The case was simple: greatly reduced cost for IT and the same, if not better, performance than the MacBook Pros. I think Apple saw this pattern. If they'd carried on matching the laptop chips in core counts and with eGPUs on the horizon, you would have been able to build a desktop computer, with a faster graphics card than the Mac Pro with and a great monitor with spare change left over. On benchmarks it would beat the Mac Pro in single core performance and have a better GPU. It makes sense they crippled it until now. They've realigned it into their line up with an expected very powerful Mac Pro, which if this is anything to go by may indicate they are not worried about GPU performance being close to the Mac Pro. Expect it to be priced similar to a MacBook Pro, minus screen, with similar performance.