Wasn't the 2019 Mac Pro about Apple listening to grumpy Cheesegrater aficionados and re-making the Mac Pro the way they say they want it?
In hindsight of the success of AppleSi, which is entirely about cutting down on options and making decisive engineering choices about the physical edge of the system and the balance of features and integration, the latest macs achieve an insanely great level of price/performance, the aficionados will now drop new Cheesegrater because of its antiquated design tradeoffs.
How anyone reckons this evolution into a need for Apple to return to its roots and offer boards is bizarre thinking. I mean come on, Apple offered its boards in wood boxes too.
"Dear Tim Cook, as a long time Apple customer, there's a matter of rare wood I'd love to bring to your attention..."
As to gripes about modularity: The new Macs have a very sensible physical edge: It's called powercord, erhernet and Thunderbolt.
If you lament not being able to jam a $1500 4080 into a mini, well... you could also just add another well-provisioned Mini!
The use-case argument of "But I want to run Shadow of the Tombraider at 4K 120fps" seems not very persuasive for Apple to chestcrack its designs to let you stuff a 3rd-party 400W x16 PCIe card in there.
You might imagine Apple already did its homework and sized Thunderbolt as PCIe3 x4 because that's the right fit for most expansion uses of this era.
And there's a hidden-in-plain-sight story about GPUs which is that for a sanely designed system (where the sanity is partly measured by strong matching of the SW engineering to the application) work isn't as bottlenecked by PCIe as Gaming GPU marketing makes you think. PCIe is advancing more because of storage and networking in server class designs.
So what we have with M2 is Apple has applied its extensive competencies in design and integration to offer extraordinary price/performance in a straightforward inherently reliable package!
It's counter intuitive to a generation brought up on gaming PCs, but Apple finally delivered on what Int(el) had has been promising about "integration" all along. It's just an oddity of history that Apple did it with TaiwanSemi... But it's not like Intel didn't get every chance. Afterall, the Tim Cook legacy is in Orient or nowhere.
With M2, hackintoshers should be stoked that they can just get great builds off the shelf straight from Apple, with all the benefits and privileges that entails.
As to herds of cats geeking out on configs unencumbered by the constraints of a totalitarian dictatorship erecting fences around every aspect of the device to protect their data—where for better or worse your data is also considered their data—Linux continues to offers unmatched levels of nerdlyness. 1000x of OpenCore.
In light of M2, my review of the 2 years I spent grappling with my hack is that it's been a ridiculous waste of time! I should have studied something pertinent to the future.
OTOH enjoyable hobbies are always a waste of time.
