Neglect on the internals side is objectionable, but what of the the case? It's still just as (subjectively) beautiful today as it was six years ago. Does a product really need to radically look different just to be "new?"

Well, for one, it's huge. I'd love to see a smaller package that could still hold as many internal drives and PCIe cards. Something that could sit comfortably on top of a desk or be easily rack-mounted would be nice.

Marco actually wrote a nice article about this: http://www.marco.org/2011/11/02/scaling-down-the-mac-pro

Personally, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Apple was just keeping the Mac Pro alive long enough for third-party Thunderbolt accessories to catch on. Once you can plug in all the expansion you needed over Thunderbolt, what's the point of the Mac Pro? Just faster CPU and more RAM -- so maybe they'll release a special Mac Mini that's like a normal Mini but with Xeon processors and a ton of memory.

They have a "Mac mini server" today, and they've had an "Xserve cluster node" in the past, so it wouldn't be completely out of line for Apple to release a special version.

A lot of us wouldn't find it ideal, but it could be an answer to the "I need a Mac with 32GB of RAM" question, and Apple does seem to prefer all-in-one boxes that users plug their own external accessories into.

I'd politely like to ask..

What, besides A/V work, is a 6+ core OS X machine necessary for?

Scientific computing, system modeling, numerics, CAD/CAM, visualization, developing highly concurrent software, event processors, rendering, machine learning (esp vision/video/spatial stuff), genetic algorithms, databases, GIS, crypto, traffic processing, theorem proving, compiling stuff, exploratory data mining. Gaming, maybe. I routinely saturate my MBP's 4 HT cores. It's also nice to develop on the same architecture you'll deploy to; helps with concurrency tuning.

Not that you can't run these on smaller devices; these are just easy ways to use up a lot of CPU.

Good reasons but I wonder is the current/new generation 12-core Mac Pro inadequate for this? It could be better but it still seems to serve its purpose.

Depends on what you're doing. I'd be satisfied with a 12-core Mac Pro for everyday development--but if a 128-core Xeon were available I'd take it gladly.

When I was working on quantum state diffusion, it took many hours on a 24-node cluster for a single run. In many of these tasks, the problem will expand to consume all reasonably available resources; more cores allow greater precision, wider sampling of parameters, higher fidelity, etc.

some of the iOS developers at my work use them just so they can compile faster.

then they're doing it wrong.

what? Clang parallelizes compilation 6 > 4. duh.