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The Most Powerful iMac Pro Now Costs $15,927 (vice.com)
Apple recently updated the upgrade options for the iMac Pro, and getting the very best will cost you. A baseline model will cost you just under $5,000, and maxing out the hardware to absurd heights runs a whopping $15,927. An anonymous reader writes: The most expensive possible upgrade is a $5,200 charge for upgrading the RAM from 32GB to a startling 256GB. Other addons include an additional $700 for a 16GB Radeon video card and $2,400 for a 2.3 Ghz Intel processor with 18 cores. Almost $16,000 is a lot of money for a computer, especially one so overpowered that there are very few reasonable applications of its hardware. Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games, and 32-64GB will take care of most video editing and 3D modeling tasks. With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.
News for Appleheads, stuff that costs a shit ton of money.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games Sounds familiar to me. No comments, other than the famous "640K ought to be enough for anybody." is often attributed erroneously to Bill Gates.
With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.. Of course, because both tasks are memory-bound, and not compute-bound /sarcasm.
When adjusted for inflation the Lisa costs more. 256 GB ram will be in celeron laptops a few decades from now.
Just putting this here for posterity.
If your time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour, then this purchase becomes justifiable if it can save you a sufficient number of hours. I don't think that there are that many people who will see significant improvements from maxing this thing out. About half of the cost is maxing out the RAM and using the largest internal SSD possible. You can save considerably by avoiding the Apple tax and installing your own RAM upgrade and you've probably already got an external RAID setup for storage if you're in the market for this kind of machine. The $2,400 for the extra 10 cores is probably the only thing that most people would want/need to touch and I expect that over a few years of use, it's likely to justify its cost.
Sixteen grand for a machine like this is still dirt cheap for a high end animation studio like Pixar or Ghibli.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
I wouldn't say 32-64GB is too much for some of those tasks, CAD and the like could easily spike 128GB with modern systems. The RAM is just an option because the Intel processor is designed for servers/workstations and simply allows you to. It's also useful if you have a rig of GPU's, which this iMac is capable of powering a number of eGPU systems so for very remote circumstances I can see it being useful.
In comparison, a Dell workstation can run you a lot higher, the CPU and RAM being the primary cost drivers, one of those Xeons by itself can cost upwards of $10k on the street.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
this computer will be in the scrapheap.
Everyone knows why you need 256GB RAM, you need it to run Chrome!
. . . that Chrome won't eat it all.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
You don't have to pay Apple's prices to upgrade RAM, you can buy the chips yourself. The process to get to the ram slots is somewhat involved, but you can also just have Apple install the ram you bring them.
The thing is the RAM the iMac Pro uses is not cheap (2666MHz DDR4 ECC / PC4-21300), so you'll be paying a lot regardless of the path you take. For instance an iFixit RAM upgrade kit to 128GB is $2,000.00. To reach 265GB you'll need four 64GB memory chips... and probably best not to use the cheapest ones. Crucial does not even list chips that will work with the iMac Pro...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
48 Gigs of RAM and room for eight hard drives plus SSD raid card internally et cetera makes these a great option still and sadly the only option. The future will be what it is. Likely Ubuntu servers for the drives if Apple can't get their heads out of the sand and with no value added for the rest of the system, well, the main workstations / laptops can be anything.
Hey, Apple, the point of a walled garden is to make the garden nice. You're at the point where you've stopped even maintaining the walls. I'm not your largest customer but I recommend a lot. When I go, the recommendations go with me.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I inherited has 2 TB drive and maxes out at 16GB RAM. I bet 10 years ago many people thought *that* was excessive at $5k or more. I guess the options were i5 or i7 CPU. I forget what the graphics card is...some type of Radeon. I use it for a recording studio. Works like a champ.
Apple's been shitting the bed on cooling solutions and just jamming more powerful hardware into their passively cooled units. Last power mac they released immediately thermal throttles.
"Many of us are not narcissistic attention seeking whores and do not want to be in the spotlight for any reason." - He wasn't referring to you, Kendall.
Great for hosting VMs.
I have 64GB of memory, and absolutely wish I could add more. My CPU's not the bottleneck, but I suspect that if I had 256GB of RAM, I could then have enough VMs running all the time that the CPU *might* become a problem.
Now the question is - could you put together an equivalent non-Apple machine with these specs, and for how much? I'm betting the answer is yes, and it'd be a few thousands cheaper.
Everyone knows how expensive Macs are.
As in the statistics system. I deal with data scientist that do spend $16k+ per week on data modeling and forecasting at AWS. With that expense, it's should be easy to justify that desktop. But they'd complain about only 18 cores.
For that amount I would expect blowjobs on demand.
"Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games,..."
Please. Nobody needs more than 640k: Just ask Billy!
Well, Pixar would be using these as workstations, not rendering nodes, right?
When my friend worked at a pre-press facility for a few years, their standard practice was to buy everyone doing graphics work machines with the RAM maxxed out, or nearly so. It was just too much hassle to go around and upgrade them later, and nobody complained about having too little but nearly everyone complained about not having enough.
Apple's been shitting the bed on cooling solutions and just jamming more powerful hardware into their passively cooled units.
The iMac pro has an excellent cooling system with two huge fans (hint: fans are not passive), it's extremely quiet and does a great job keeping the system cool.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you are maxing out a iMac Pro at $16K, I doubt you'd be spending it on playing video games. Sadly this is really the only Apple that professional video editors or animators can use right now.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When I have a project large enough to support a tech support then I buy linux machines cause they can be cheaper than macs.
But when I have to do my own or I'm using the interface I buy macs. Trying to keep a linux boxed patched and all the ports closed takes expertise to be confident it was done right. Getting hacked one time on a linux box for me was so expensive it killed a multi-year project.
The premium to get a powerful mac is pretty cheap compared to an employee recruitment, retention, and total compensation
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You can't clean dust from them easily or at all
Do you need to though? With a wholly vertical design there's really not much of a way for dust to build up. It gets flushed out the system by the fans and doesn't really have anywhere to collect the way it would with a flat motherboard and/or case design that has a lot of area at the bottom to collect dust.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Back when workstations ruled $15K in current USD was peanuts. You'd be lucky if you could even get a balanced low end system for that. That said, those workstations were far more expandable and gave you something you couldn't get with commodity hardware. Macs make very little sense for anything except a couple of niche areas (laptops and photo editing). Even photo editing they aren't awesome for.
For pretty much any other use they make very little sense, and people with a clue who really need some computational power have not bought macs for a couple or more decades.
Current macs don't have more memory bandwidth than typical PC's. They don't have significantly more compute power either. As far as IO - it's pretty much the same too. You are also locked into crappy GPU choices.
On the other hand workstations traditionally had oodles more memory bandwidth, compute and IO (storage) bandwidth.
The whole idea 256 GB of memory is a lot is ridiculous too. I say this having personally spec'd out machines with 512 GB well over a decade ago.
Before anyone says I just hate Apple - I've owned several macs and other apple products. I got deals on them and they were fine, but they weren't a step up from a PC.
Now if apple offered a mac that had say 3-4x the memory bandwidth available from PC's and 10x the IO, then it would be something to consider, but that won't happen, because Apple would rather sell more machines that are PC's for a larger markup to people who want OSX and like being inmates in the Apple prison.
Pick the highest range Precision, 2x 28 core Xeons and add 3TB RAM, and you're well on your way to supercar prices...
Not buying though, just wondered if bathing would compare withan iMac Pro. This is almost an order of magnitude more expensive.
Kendall you are the world's dumbest fangirl. You have no idea how much non-Apple niche ram costs, you're a moron. Your ignorance and inexperience are breathtaking for someone with such a need to blather as you.
Why do I hate Apple so much? Because they are literally raping their fanboy customers. Let's do a comparative breakdown of this so-called "$16k Build" based on NewEgg's prices: -256GB DDR4 RAM: Around $1,000 -16GB GPU (Radeon VII): $700 -18-core Intel CPU (Intel i9 9980XE): $2,000 -1TB SSD and 8TB HDD: Around $300 -Other components (case, motherboard, fans, etc.): Around $1,000 -28" 4k monitor (good brand): Around $500 .... At most, that's $5,500 in hardware (and that's WITHOUT the enormous discount Apple is getting). Even if you DOUBLE the hardware cost to account for a decent profit margin/assembly cost/distribution cost/proprietary OS, that's still not even close to the $16,000 price tag.
You would be better off buying 32 Supreme bricks for $500 each (https://www.ebay.com/itm/DS-New-Supreme-Brick-New-York-F-W-2016-FW16-Box-Logo-100-AUTHENTIC-/263035238535).
"The cause of fear is ignorance."
Kendall you are the world's dumbest fangirl. You have no idea how much non-Apple niche ram costs, you're a moron. Your ignorance and inexperience are breathtaking for someone with such a need to blather as you.
> Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games, and 32-64GB will take care of most video editing and 3D modeling tasks. With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes
AI, Games and 3D modelling may be popular things, but they don't come close to the space and computationally bounded computational problems that you come across in engineering and physics.
In my case, an arbitrary amount of compute power and memory can be thrown at randomness distinguishability testing and entropy estimation. I'll take all the cores and all the memory available thank you. If you do finite element simulation, you probably have similar concerns.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Who buys a Mac for video games?
The large RAM options will be for people doing serious work, though those people should know better than to buy the RAM from Apple.
...and just like a BMW it will lose it's value the second it leave the shipping depot! Personally I think you could build a couple of serious levela Hackintoshes with that kind of cash.
When you see retarded statements like this in headline article BE WARY.
Here is an expensive thing! Look at it! Look how expensive it is!
True story... A customer came into the Bar stating his MB Pro was running slowly. I asked him if he could reproduce the issue. He said sure and opened his Mac. He opened Safari and EIGHTY (80) windows opened in a cascading fashion. EACH window contained multiple tabs! A quick multiplication revealed a minimum of 400 tabs and most like far more.
My mind was racing on how to tell this guy that it will never work with tact. Explaining RAM and resource usage was met with the response... "but that is the way I like to browse".
For this guy, 256 megs of RAM would not be sufficient.
I rather buy myself a used car, and build my own Linux workstation ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wish it was possible to completely hide every one of your comments. I suppose one has to actually create an account to do that, though? Everything you write is immediately forgettable.
They use custom software. Like a heavily customized Maya, their own renderer and their own toolchain. All running on Linux, since, duh, it's customizable!
Those are professionals! People who actually use their computer, not just fixed applications that use it internally. Not posers who merely use hardware als a decorative ego boost.
No professional uses Apple. Only people who want to *look* professional and feel professional, exactly because they are clueless, use Apple.
The Atari 800/400 had similar problems.
It was designed for an SS-50 bus, and actually had the connectors for the edge connector on the motherboard.
However, by the time it was near market, the newer FCC regs meant that it just wouldn't be possible for it to pass.
The result is that the board was wrapped in a think (1/4"? It's been a while . . ) RF case, with limited connections.
And *that* in turn mandated those idiotic serial diskette drives.
At least they eventually figured out (Rev B ROM on them, iirc) that they could skip alternate sectors, so as to be ready to read again---rather than waiting an entire revolution . . . :groan:
I had Serial # 49 as my demo unit, and it also had a different graphics chip--the one they originally designed, instead of the less capable one that shipped.
I *think* that that's the one we sawed through the casing on with plans to connect to the bus, but I'm no longer sure.
hawk
HP and Dell offer servers with multiple 16 core processors, 256+ GB of RAM, and TB of SSD for under $10,000...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Put your OS and programs on there*, and your computer will run almost as fast as it should...
*The old Macs didn't clear the RAM on reboot, so you could install your system folder there.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yeah, I know those types. Confusing the tab bar for their bookmarks tree. Having open dozends of not hundreds of tabs at the same time. Many of them multiple times since they can't even find them in there anymore. Using addons to even be able to navigate all those tabs, that make them look like ... you guessed it ... a bookmarks tree.
And of course no crap blocker, so all the ads, and all the videos are kept in RAM.
And then they act surprised their browser bloats like the Zimbabwe Dollar.
Psychology Protip: Don't use more tabs per window than you have active memory slots in your brain. (Usually 6-9.)
Don't use more application windows either.
If you want more, put them into groups. Like a bookmark folder tree. Then you can stay below the 6-9 items per group, and your brain can always handle it.
I just built a system all from Newegg that passed $11k, but I think it's better than whatever this is. It had 64 cores (two AMD Epyc processors), 512gb RAM, four 1tb Samsung Evo 860 pro SSD's and four 4tb WD Gold drives, in a server case with a 960-watt redundant power supply. Why is this so much money?-- oh yeah, you get to run Mac OS. That's worth at least the extra $5k (and half the processor and memory).
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
"With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people."
Really? You're going to lease computing power? HAHAHAHA. Yes, you're going to buy a computer which is basically a tablet with a stand, and everything including the cpu is probably soldered to the mainboard and non-user serviceable, to ensure it costs the maximum amount once Applecare expires. This is probably the least cost effective way of doing that.
And if you actually had "advanced AI", you'd probably use something that used multiple GPU's. Nobody who had serious kinds of AI applications would use an iMac (OpenCL is NOT advanced AI).
This is a better computer than the iMac, but it still has the same shortcomings as an iMac. The only people who would buy it with this much RAM, are often people who "want the best" and have more money than brains, or companies who are given a budget, and have some left over which they want to use up.
Apple overcharges for their RAM anyway, so you wouldn't get that much RAM from Apple, unless you really are an idiot.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You're looking for a NAS. If an article regarding a $15,000 workstation is at all appealing whatsoever, then having a dedicated storage array is entirely practical for 1/4 of the price.
"But Voyager, they're expensive!"
Let's assume you're a DIY tinkerer. A quick Newegg build on a Ryzen3 with 32GB of ECC RAM, a case, and 5x4TB drives is about $1,350 soup to nuts; in RAIDz2 (RAID6), that's still 12TB of storage with two drives fault tolerance, and I only limited it to 5 because that's the maximum number of drives I could buy at a clip (the build supports three more on the case and the mobo). Do two drive orders and you can hit 24TB before you hit physical limits.
Let's assume you're not a tinkerer and basically want a thing in a box. $1,500 will get you the aforementioned 5 drives and an 8-bay QNAP.
"But network connectivity is slow!"
Add about $400 to the QNAP and $600 to the DIY build and you've got 10-gigabit connectivity, possibly a bit more if you're on a Mac and need a thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter.
"But then I can't access my data when I'm not home!"
The $15,000 Mac won't let you do that. However, all of these systems have some form of remote access, bit it the more arcane SFTP on the DIY build, or the shiny WebUIs and dropbox-like mobile apps of QNAP and Synology.
"But Thunderbolt has lower latency!"
Possibly, but 10GbE over Fiber is pretty damn quick, especially if you do a direct connect to your machine. An 8-bay TB enclosure will cost you $2,000 before you put drives in it, and you get zero options for multi-user or remote access.
"But it's ugly!"
Both Cat6 and fiber cables support long enough runs to put the storage appliance wherever you'd like to hide it. Thunderbolt doesn't. If you're willing to go a bit higher on the DIY front, Lian Li makes some beautiful cases with a price tag to reflect them.
There are countless combinations out there; if storage is your only concern and you've got somewhere to put an 8U rack, QNAP has a rack mounted NAS with a companion storage expander that you could fill with 4TB drives, landing you with 80TB of storage (assuming 4 disk fault tolerance) and *still* spend less than this $15,000 Mac.
One of the reasons I turned against Apple many years ago was that they consistently charge premium prices for their proprietary equipment. The main advantage gained in making this premium purchase is the use of Apple's shiny user interface and the cachet of viewing yourself as an artist or an intellectual because you have the wisdom to go Apple. This is just another example of the elitism that they encourage.
I am satisfied with the choice of user interfaces available on Linux, where I can choose my own hardware and fix most of it myself. And the hardware price is determined by demand, not by marketers. No thanks, Apple. I'm done with you.
Slashtards constantly whine about Macs having anemic hardware specs. Ok, fine.
Now, along comes a Mac that turns the specs up to "11", and what happens?
The Slashtards now argue that these Specs are unreasonably high, and "nobody needs this much RAM", etc.
Ridiculous bunch of babies.
You think apple pays their devs well? hahahah
I mean, in all the years I've used Apple products, that's always a complaint about them from detractors; They don't give you enough flexibility or choice!
Well, here's a system from Apple that you can configure in all sorts of insane, over the top ways, IF you actually want to -- and people are complaining because it's too much?
I actually own one of these iMac Pros, but I purchased it in the standard "base" configuration. I was also able to buy it for $1,000 off the regular price on a sale that Micro Center stores ran on it, shortly after it was released. They ran various sales on it for months after that, varying between about $500 off and that $1000 discount -- but there were definitely some opportunities to get one for less than Apple's advertised pricing.
It's been a great computer and I have no regrets purchasing it.... The 5K display in it is excellent and partially justifies the base cost of the computer when you see how much equivalent monitors sell for separately. I certainly don't see the need to buy the upgraded configurations for many thousands more? But I'm glad those were available, in case people needed them. I can see someone running a lot of virtual machines in test environments, as a developer, possibly needing a lot more RAM. Maybe not 256GB but 128GB? Yeah .... could happen.
And now you have a dell not an apple. Sorry to hear it dude
What will make my shiny new imac pro obsolete? (bearing in mind that nothing on the imac pro can be upgraded without surgery)
Will it be new graphics hardware?
Will it be the widespread availability of cpus with more than 18 cores?
Will it be higher resolution displays?
No. It will be the emergence of bloatware the likes of which even god has never seen.
"You can buy better, but you can't pay more"
We're not happy 'til you're not happy.
He doesn't know much about computers. But he wants a better one than everyone else to read email on.
Still waiting for the Mac Pro Tower. Having gone through half a dozen iMac all in ones they each had their lives shortened drastically by the screen going bad. A Xeon will make those fans run loud not G5 risc chip fast but still over 150 degrees F.
Frink's prediction might come true after all. "I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them "
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You can browse just fine using 8 or even 4gb of ram.
Granted it will begin to slow down at some point, much sooner than with more, but it will work just fine.
What you are seeing is the system doing what it's supposed to do, using what is available. What's the point of having all that ram if it's just sitting there idle? It will release it if needed, but it will take what it can because that's what makes it most efficient. This is especially important on a laptop where you can trade ram for cpu and drive cycles, both of which consume far more battery than the ram.
Also, run a good adblocker, on many webpages more than half the data is just ads and tracking data (mostly the latter!). It's insane how much tracking happens, particularly on news sites.
Why do I hate Apple so much? Because they are literally raping their fanboy customers. Let's do a comparative breakdown of this so-called "$16k Build" based on NewEgg's prices:
-256GB DDR4 RAM: Around $1,000
-16GB GPU (Radeon VII): $700
-18-core Intel CPU (Intel i9 9980XE): $2,000
Intel's ark says
Memory Specifications
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 128 GB
Memory Types DDR4-2666
Max # of Memory Channels 4
ECC Memory Supported No
Half the memory and no ECC support.
Frankly, I find it difficult to imagine why someone would need a graphics workstation with more than 128 GB RAM (as opposed to offloading the work to a server, or a HPC cluster) So I can't say that ECC is an absolute must...
Hmm ... let's see, my first 'real' PC was a 486-DX33, with 8MB of RAM, a 1MB video card, and a motherfucking 325MB hard drive -- and that was pushing $2K in something like '93. What a sexy beast it was.
It's a spendy toy, but if you want it and can afford it, or you actually need it (for what I cannot say) then it's probably worth it.
I mean, I don't need one ... but I'll admit to sitting in front of 4 monitors on my home machine with 8-cores and 32GB of RAM and about 8TB of disk storage, so I'm not above a little overkill in the specs department.
To me those specs are close to one of the blades in our ESX farm, but for someone else, that's an engineering workstation.
Everything you write is immediately forgettable.
Forgotten the last one yet?
I wish it was possible to completely hide every one of your comments.
You don't like what he writes?
For most people maxing everything is going to be a waste of money.
Yes but a mere 15k is so little money anyway, I mean it's not much more expensive than a home coffee machine, really. And it's not going to hurt having a bit of extra RAM, is it?
Now how much does Rice-A-Roni cost again.
What a bobby dazzler!
Sincerely yours
The Duke
Underutilizing computers has apparently become so commonplace the general people doesn't even know what computers are used for anymore.
No, computers are not devices just to browse Facebook or play video games.
Some people actually use them to run real programs on them.
256GB is also pretty mundane, pretty much any half-decent machine has that. RAM is cheap.
As a developer, I can easily use up more than 16GB just by starting an IDE or a compilation. And I'm not even doing hardware synthesis.
Yeah, that machine even included two independent power connections for transparent failover, and a couple of hot-swap PCI Express slots. That wasn't some amazing deal, it was an ordinary price on eBay.
I suspect I've gotten a bit more "bang for the buck" than from buying anything Apple ;-)
The problem with using NAS/SAN drives is pure economics. A lot of people who require high end workstations will be doing work on consumer OS's. With GIS, it's Windows (ArcGIS). So this tends to throw a spanner in the works. The setup for an iSCSI over Ethernet connection requires a separate network (well it should if you're doing it properly) and If for any reason the drives are disconnected which is a problem on Windows desktop operating systems it costs a lot of money. So it becomes trivial to just say "throw a bunch of SSD's in there and RAID/JBOD them, then tell the GIS analyst to move the finished work SAN/NAS after they're done" which will be much smaller than the multitudes of datasets they're working with. Any roadblocks cost huge sums of money. So in the economic sense, you'll have both because the amount of money you'll lose by being cheap isn't worth the potential savings. The simplicity of local storage is simply worth the additional cost. Given the low cost of SSD's these days, it can even be cheaper than remote storage.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You could buy a MacPro for tha money. 64 GB is enough for simple office work.
Slashdot confirms that Macs are too damn upgradeable.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The problem with using NAS/SAN drives is pure economics.
A lot of people who require high end workstations will be doing work on consumer OS's. With GIS, it's Windows (ArcGIS).
The GP was talking about photos and videos, not GIS datasets, so the goalposts just got shifted. To address it though, at $16,000 for the Mac in TFA, A Poweredge with plenty of storage and an Optiplex or two to access it are entirely practical alternatives.
The setup for an iSCSI over Ethernet connection requires a separate network (well it should if you're doing it properly) and If for any reason the drives are disconnected which is a problem on Windows desktop operating systems it costs a lot of money.
We're already quite far away from 'storing lots of photos and videos', and iSCSI seems like a weird protocol to implement in this context, and I really don't understand what you're getting at with respect to Windows losing access to network storage vs. another OS.
So it becomes trivial to just say "throw a bunch of SSD's in there and RAID/JBOD them, then tell the GIS analyst to move the finished work SAN/NAS after they're done" which will be much smaller than the multitudes of datasets they're working with. Any roadblocks cost huge sums of money.
Pretty much everything referenced here has very little to do with either the GP or TFA. If you're dealing with that sort of data, you're not in the market for the $16,000 iMac, you're not in the market for a Thunderbolt enclosure like the GP referenced, and apparently downtime is so expensive that you're probably better off having a server in a server room somewhere and RDPing into it, either using local storage or a SAN...which is clearly affordable giving how expensive downtime apparently is in your situation.
So in the economic sense, you'll have both because the amount of money you'll lose by being cheap isn't worth the potential savings. The simplicity of local storage is simply worth the additional cost. Given the low cost of SSD's these days, it can even be cheaper than remote storage.
In your case, no...but you weren't tacitly eyeballing a $2,000 diskless Thunderbolt enclosure, either. The use case you describe is only similar to the GP in that it involves computers and data which needs to store somewhere. ArcGIS and Lightroom clearly have vastly different requirements as to how data is stored and accessed. That's fine, but I wouldn't recommend a DIY FreeNAS or a QNAP to someone whose primary concern is downtime *and* can apparently back it up with a check big enough to make that problem go away.