A lot of media applications where you need audio cards, capture cards, etc.

For just a computer it’s extremely expensive. For multimedia use it can run the workload of a rack of equipment 5x the cost.

upgradeability, flexing, setup eye-candy

I agree that the price seems ridiculous. Maybe a 1000 dollar upcharge may make sense but 3000?

At 28:47 in this interview with Apple execs, https://youtu.be/DgLrBSQ6x7E it seems they argue it’s for PCIE expansion, where in audio production or networking potential buyers already have very expensive cards they would like to continue using

I was wondering about this.

The most well-known use-case of the Mac Pro is in video editing. Famously, Pixar use Macs Pro to render their movies, so being able to install GPUs is essential. The MP23 doesn’t support extra GPUs, either via PCIE or Thunderbolt, so what exactly is the point?

It’s a pretty niche product and most of the advantages over the Mac Studio are really not consumer facing.

While the cooling solution in the Studio is quite good, the Mac Pro’s larger chassis should allow for even better cooling which may allow for greater sustained workloads, such as video transcoding and all types of rendering.

While the Studio makes sense for end-users, if you have have a shop that does distributed computing, rendering, etc. the rack mount option is appealing as you can have all the horsepower and supporting infrastructure, e.g. networking, power, tucked away neatly in a closet as opposed to sprawled across your workspace.

Thunderbolt is great for attaching external consumer storage, but if you have petabytes of video and audio stored on a fibre-channel NAS or DAS, with multiple users accessing it, that’s not the type of thing you’re going to sustain on people’s desktops.

Its primary target is medium to large scale, distributed computing. It’s not a high end desktop, it’s a server class device.