While I think the Mac Pro is a nice bit of kit, it feel heavily specialised for video editing, post production and 3D work with a quiet profile. But if your sp

While I think the Mac Pro is a nice bit of kit, it feel heavily specialised for video editing, post production and 3D work with a quiet profile. But if your speccing competing kit, why wouldn't you build a 'better' product, rather then trying to find the exact parts. Your never going to build an off the shelf system with the same parts, make it quieter and keep it under budget when apple is pumping them off the production line. Why would you spec a wintel system with a single 12 core proc instead of 2x hex (or oct) core procs?!?!? The 12 core part is rare and expensive, compared to the commodity 6 core part. Why would a workstation grade machine at this point in time not have a mirrored disk array? Why would you not have either 10gbit or quad 1gbit ethernet. Bond these up and connect to fast NAS / SAN storage for storage. Alternatively use a SAS connector and directly connect to a JBOD. A dual proc server board might even have 14 SAS/SATA ports to allow you to have a nice local storage array running RAID10/5/6. An Intel Xeon E5-2630v2 (hex core, 2.6ghz) can be had for $792 AUD a pop. Not to mention that you can put hundreds of GB of ECC memory in a Dual proc Xeon board. Some people will value size over performance/price and think that such a machine will never be a replacement. I think on the other hand having a RAIDed system disk and much more ram is more valuable for my workloads. While they will sell thousands of them, I really don't see the value outside a small number of applications optimised for OSX. For these workloads the cost is insignificant compared to the productivity. Its disappointing for those hoping Apple might finally build a decent general purpose workstation, but with such limited upgradability I can't see these being used for a lot of the applications that people considered the previous mac pro for.