IIRC, the problem was that Apple left those people (and other professionals in the Apple ecosystem) with literally no good options.
I'm only half-joking. I've seen a lot of wasteful spending in government and medical research divisions on Mac Pros (this was before the garbage can design) for precisely these reasons. At my last research job, I got a beefy (at the time) Xeon 24 core Mac Pro with 3 Tesla Nvidia cards as my work station. Really couldn't complain. Was a super nice machine.
Who could’ve predicted the year they bring back the Mac Pro is the year AMD leapfrogs Intel though.
