Apple finally got around to offering pricing and purchasing options for the new MacPro on their web site. Unfortunately the listing is just before the Christmas holiday and a tiny bit too late for me to ask Santa, or my wife, to put one of them under the tree for me this year. This is probably a good thing since the fully maxed out version of the MacPro with a 12 core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 64 GB of ram, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, and a 1 TB internal flash base hard drive clocks in at slightly below 10 grand. When you add in dual Thunderbolt or 4K displays the price increases exponentially. The sticker shock from that setup can nearly spark a heart attack for people like me that are comfortable building and maintaining their own Windows PC based machines.
But as a person that uses both systems, Mac and Windows, sometimes your time is more valuable than your money. And while in SOME cases you can you build a comparable PC system, you might not want to have to deal with the upgrade and maintenance issues of the PC environment. This is especially true if you are in the midst of creative projects with tight deadlines. I am not an Apple fanboy, and I agree that in many cases they rip you off with their upgrade prices (CPU, ram and hard drives). This one of the reason why, in order to save money, I always buy my Apple ram and hard drive upgrades from companies like Other World Computing and NewEgg. But there is something to be said for having the hardware and software designed by a single entity.
Now whether or not I can talk my wife into letting me drop 14k for that convenience is an entirely different argument.