Not so long ago I got significantly more than the current trade-in for the $52,000 Mac Pro, for a 27 inch 5k iMac Pro also with the mega-Xeon and a ton of RAM,

Not so long ago I got significantly more than the current trade-in for the $52,000 Mac Pro, for a 27 inch 5k iMac Pro also with the mega-Xeon and a ton of RAM, etc. I think they wanted to get them off the market and get those people onto the Apple Silicon, which was going to rapidly eclipse the Xeon iMac Pro for those more 'general prosumer tasks', video editing et al. Not at all the same situation with the top-end Mac Pros with the Xeon: all the outboard stuff is the point there, and you can't as easily eclipse that outboard stuff. Put simply, the $52,000 machine might as well remain in service doing what it's doing, because Apple isn't directly replacing that. They were very much directly replacing what my old Xeon iMac Pro did, so they put more pressure on the trade-in scenario to motivate that happening. They apparently have no interest in pressuring those top-end Mac Pros to get off the market, so the trade-in is completely pathetic: hang onto the thing and keep it in service, they have no special replacement targeted or perhaps even planned.