All of the problems with the Mac Pro are theoretically solvable. They could even add expandable memory if they really wanted to. But since the Mac Studio is so ridiculously fast, why bother? The number of people who are going to be held back by the Mac Studio is a minuscule market not worth serving, they would never make a profit on it, and ultimately Apple is a business not a charity.
The Mac Pro is Apple saying: “if you need more than 192GB of RAM, we can’t help. But if you need PCI-E, we have a lot of old Mac Pro enclosures left over from the past 3 years when we didn’t sell any Intel Mac Pros, here’s a Mac Studio in a bigger box, enjoy”
I completely agree - a computer like any system is a series of design choices, compromises and decisions. Apple's vision of the Mac appears to be of a small, svelte and powerful system with limited extensibility. These are the systems of which they sell the most.
Regarding socketable memory - I believe that their current memory setup is significantly faster than any system with socketed memory. Given that they market the memory bandwidth heavily in their specs I imagine this would lead to a perceived performance drop for what is essentially their most expensive system.
My one gripe with the new pro is that they have reintroduced a problem they themselves solved, because they chose to not support discrete GPUs. MPX looks like a really neat solution to both internal system cable management, and the routing of thunderbolt and display data through the system. It's a shame it only existed in one generation of one product
Interestingly enough from looking at pictures of the new system board - they have less power cable connectors than the 2019. Is the new system using a smaller capacity PSU than the old?
The Mac Pro is Apple saying: “if you need more than 192GB of RAM, we can’t help. But if you need PCI-E, we have a lot of old Mac Pro enclosures left over from the past 3 years when we didn’t sell any Intel Mac Pros, here’s a Mac Studio in a bigger box, enjoy”