Actually, the Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the iPhone. Or rather, Apple’s one-trick-pony design of their quote unquote "desktop class" SoC to be just the iPhone SoC, but a little bigger, with the only scale options being multiples of the same chip, with everything soldered on the SoC, and then some thickheadedness on “we didn’t design the architecture with external GPUs in mind”. Apple is already getting beaten by performance-oriented traditional CPU systems, and soon, other vendors will optimize for battery life as well. And Apple will still be stuck with an iPhone chip in all their computers.
But that’s OK, because it seems they are pushing their desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS too, both in capability and lockdown, so it might all be good.
Having just upgraded from Mojave to Ventura, I don't really see that they're heavily pushing the desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS.
This is still the most powerful Unix desktop system out there, and there's nothing keeping "power users" (in lack of a better term) from treating it as such.
They've been talking about this for years though, and I think with people like Craig Federighi in place, there's no real danger of further lock downs.
Just take a look at the security hardening at disk level, war on kernel extensions, continued reliance on entitlements for basic functionality (that is not just limited to sandboxed processes). Coupled with bootargs (like amfi_get_out_of_my_way) being broken for multiple OS versions, and it leads me to a pretty clear conclusion.
But that’s OK, because it seems they are pushing their desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS too, both in capability and lockdown, so it might all be good.