[Miredly]

It's designed to be useful for more than one kind of "Pro". The old Mac Pro, for instance, seemed to completely forget about music studios and their professional requirements for Macs. This new machine may seem like overkill to software developers, but as an audio engineer, it's perfect.

I don't even want a 1TB SSD in it, the 256 is perfect to hold the OS, a few DAWs, and all the plugins I could ever want. Everything else gets saved to drives in a toaster anyway. A rackmountable unit with a ton of PCI slots for HDX/Dante cards was on my Christmas list, and I'm not alone- there's a reason they made a point of showing how many HDX cards it can fit in their presentation.

It also looks like an amazing workstation for video editors. I really don't think it's designed for software engineers who make 500k a year.

[liquidify]

256 is not enough for a serious main drive in a DAW. Sample libraries should all be on the fastest drive. There are single instruments that take up 50GB. And consider that most studios are recording in 24 or 32 bits at higher frequencies than 44.1Khz. 1TB is probably enough for a music production system although I'd personally prefer larger so that I don't have to be swapping things around all the time.

[ganoushoreilly]

I don't know anyone that keeps their samples / data on their main drive. Most have external thunderbolt enclosures.

[derefr]

Maybe you haven’t looked around in a while; the toasters are Thunderbolt-attached now, and they take (en-cartridged) NVMe SSDs. There’s nothing slow or high-latency about that. Copy your assets over to your project disk from your NAS at the start of a new project, and then forget about it.

Alternatively, forget hotswap and use a Thunderbolt DAS with RAID6. Burn your projects from your DAS to a portable SSD when you want to pass them over. Only takes a minute or two.