I’ve never had a need for a Mac Pro, but know people who do. They are not impressed with the lack of expansion and media options.
I shouldn’t need a external drive to burn a DVD to show a video to a client on a “pro” level machine.
True "pros" aren't going to be burning 4K videos onto "DVDs" or even BluRay disks. They can't hold the file. And a true pro won't mind having a high end burner separate IF he needs one. You really don't know what you're talking about when you speak of "lack of media expansion" if you are just concerned with trying to cram something into the case. The Mac Pro has gobs of expansion capability, or are you really that unfamiliar with the daisy chaining capabilities of the Thunderbolt connection system? Apple is selling every MacPro they can push off their assembly line and they are currently back logged to June. The "pros" are very impressed . . .the best way they can be: with their wallets!
Yup...
I went from a Mac Pro with two processors and four internal 2 tb hard drives to a new MP with a too-small 1 tb hard drive and one processor, non-expandable.
And yeah, we burn files on DVD all the time for clients, and yup...they took the DVD burner out.
And Mavericks is awful! Snow Leopard was bad enough but Mavericks is becoming so dumbed-down that I find myself wondering if our next purchase will be an E20 running Win 7 Pro?
I love Apple and have used their products for 20 years, but wow...the dumbing-down of PC’s and OSX is becoming really irritating.
Ed
Saw an article from, I forget where, that they connected, IIRC, 42 devices to all the available Mac Pro ports. If one were to be doing serious video work, one would think that having a muti-terabyte external RAID storage system, wouldn’t be a big deal. And having a DVD burner connected to it even less of an issue.