I would not be surprised to see them kill off or gradually phase on Mac Pros – I mean the chassis is really out-of-date, both looks, but more important function wise.

However, even though I’m Windows based I’m still getting a Hackintosh up and running in the next couple of weeks as the G5 someone donated to the film is dead. I don’t a Mac-based shop has to jump ship right now or else. I do expect a refresh with the new Xeon chips. But the refresh may well indicate the level of commitment. A stunning new case, some new form factors (e.g. Sandy Bridge-E boxes), new monitors, bunch of Thunderbolt peripherals and a bunch of third party eSATA and USB 3 add-in cards would say – not dead yet.

A motherboard refresh with new Xeons and not much more probably means discussions of investing $5 to $10k in a new MacPro box makes much sense without some kind of platform commitment from Apple. The Shake/Motion/FCP/FCPx things are revealing of how willing they are to jump ship without warning.

>the biggest pain with windows boxes are the whole virus thing...

I’ve personally owned 30+ windows machines over the years and never had a single virus infection – and neither has my wife/business partner who’s not a geek. It’s simple a matter of buying a good AV program – changing when necessary – and not being stupid on the internet. Sure, it will catch stuff occasionally (my logs show 10 or so such things over past 18 months).

Norton AV is currently the best out there and minimal impact on performance on a fast system – I run that on my laptop. My AE/NLE workstations just use free Security Essentials and never had an issue, but I’m not browsing for free MP3s or free screensavers or free other stuff on those (the #1 way people get stuff).

Also, right now Windows 7 is the most secure desktop OS in a number of metrics and not huge difference over Mac OS. So, it’s not really a major issue if you just do a basics.