Say it ain’t so. Apple wouldn’t do this to us would they?

[Eric Peterson]

Well Apple hasn’t killed any thing yet and Magna will be shipping the ExpressBox 3T soon. And as Andrew says
“I like the idea of gear becoming more modular. I’d rather have the same ThunderBolt I/O box from Blackmagic work on my desktop and laptop than have to buy an I/O card for the desktop and a separate, external I/O device for the laptop.”

[Christian Calon]

“… imagine how it might open up if you could upgrade the video card of any Mac by using an external PCI box connected via ThunderBolt?”

You can’t.
If you do the simple calculation, internal bus of PCIe is about 12x faster than TBolt. That’s what graphic cards need to achieve the speed they do on the 16x PCIe bus.
So long for modular (for now). But the MacPro IS actually like any other tower a large case full of modules which you can change or add : cards and disks and RAM and connectors. A thing you can’t do with closed boxes like MacbookPros or iMacs.
A thing Apple could do is to make the box smaller and extend the connection to Sata, PCIe, etc. You then provide the same raw computing power pro users need, you reduce the production cost and you provide the same openness and give users the choice of their peripherals.
I’m sure Magma, Sonnet and others are looking into this, but for now, the type of video cards we can add through TBolt are only acquisition cards. The major problem to the smaller box remains (I may be mistaken) the graphic cards. Even audio DSP cards run fine of FW800…

I am in need to upgrade my video production system so you may guess I consider this question quite seriously. And in my perspective, for pros, things don’t look too promising coming from Apple these days. The company in the last decade moved from “computing” into “life style” and this is now built into Lion. That’s fine. No one want to do any computing. We just want to produce works. But the only tools really adequate for the complexities of most jobs are still the big machines, the raw power of multiprocessors, video cards and GigaRams. And that is MacPro. Save us from the dark ages of Infinite rendering!
Cheers

MacBook Pro 2,5GHz, 4GBram, eSata G-Raid nTB, dual 23″ monitors, FCS3, Modul8… Nuendo 4/ Live/Reaktor 5/Euphonix/JLCooper/Motu i/o/2 G4 PowerBooks/multichannel surround audio setup.