As musicians this is a poor choice. The Xeon chips are a poor choice regarding price/performance, they need Error correcting memory, again not that useful for audio and again extra expense. An i9 cpu with regular ram will perform equally as well which means for a DAW you CAN build a better performing machine(than the lower end models) that will be just as quiet for half that price that will have TB's of M.2 and SSD drives. The $6k model comes with a single..... 256G hard drive....that's it....Also for $999.00 you could buy a nice new guitar or microphone instead of a 'STAND' .
8 years ago, Apple told us we didn't need PCI as it was dead and forced a poorly implemented TB1 on us all. The rest of the sane world carried on with PCI. Apple will now tell us 'look, we've got PCI, see how much better it is than the old MAc pro' ... A Complete U turn...same thing they did when they went to Intel CPU's.
Huge companies like Disney/Pixar stopped using Apple hardware a few years ago because of all this and went to HP Z workstations, they also offer on site warranty for 5 years in the price.
If you're a video guy, AMD threadripper will soon be coming with the 7nm die V3, the V2 32 core/64 thread CPU blasted to the top of the cinebench, beating anything out there. Thsi 32 core/64 thread CPU costs the same as the 10 core intel i9 and leaves it for dust with video rendering, so things have moved on with Windows /Linux. The 32/64 MAc pro will likely cost about $30K. $5k will get you there , silently and reliably with AMD threadripper if you use windows/Linux.
Things have moved on and Apple are playing catch up.
I think the return of PCIe is a good thing all round, keeping the T2 chip worries me as it's caused problems with audio this past year or so since introduced, Also the new machine will launch with the new OS which may render pro tools HDX and other software unusable without who knows what to upgrade..again.....
I would imagine most people here, like myself who are pro musicians/engineers/producers have been feeling the recession over the last few years and the drop in revenue from a lack of physical sales, at times like this making smart choices on what to put your money in becomes very pertinent.
my long winded point : The new Mac pro is NOT a good choice as a DAW platform unless you have money to burn, so think wisely folks before dropping $10k on an Apple made computer.
M