the human race will be long extinct, along with anything we ever built.

Three things I can guarantee will still be around:

1) Porn. Even as we evolve into beings of pure energy we will wire ourselves to be electrically excited by existing porn as a tribute.

2) Trolls. The art of trolling will be unimaginable at that point but we all know they will be there.

3) Emacs. It's too damn pretty to die.

You missed does more than play games.

But Apple hasn't...

Question is: Whose eyes will decide this question?

Finally, we have found the perfect use for Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Catch-22 says so.

Flood them with too much data? They can't sort what they have now, but they sure can store a lot And if they start to run low on space, they'll just make Congress fund another yottabyte of storage.

Well, a warrant to intercept your electronic data is available with a rubber stamp from the FISA court, and would be effective as far back as five years (probably longer, but they've only admitted to five years so far). A warrant to intercept and read your mail might also be available through FISA, though I'm not sure of that. At worst, they'd still have to physically open the mail, which might be noticeable.

So does USB...and serial for that matter. Whether one would want to is another matter. Thunderbolt is a small fraction of native x16 speeds

Apparently someone else who knows more than you thinks it's a good idea.

Could have saved yourself a lot of embarrassment there with a bit of Google work.

Where is your evidence of this?

That it's three 4K displays? My "evidence" is the Apple Mac Pro specs page which says exactly that.

Name one system EVER where you could subtract pixels from one display and magically be allowed to connect another.

You may want to read up on the meaning of the word BANDWIDTH. In fact the total amount of bandwidth dictates the number of displays you can attach via thunderbolt, you can have more displays withe lower resolution. You seriously do not understand how that is possible?

Those aren't specs, it's an ad

It's an ad, with some specs. I see the problem though, it's not that you can't read, it's that you lack the technical depth and understanding of newer technologies to understand what is going on.

I'll let you have the last response since there's no way you can learn enough to write an intelligent reply before the story is locked.

The metadata can be copied (and I'd be shocked if it isn't), but copying the actual content would require opening the mail unless they have some really insanely clever optical scanners that can read multiple pages that are folded over on each other inside an envelope designed to prevent easy see-through. There's still a strong chance that unless you start seeing envelopes showing up opened, your postal mail is still safe.

It's trivial to duplicate electronic data, though. The metadata-only argument also presumes that is truly the extent of it, and that the NSA is not also storing all of the actual email/call recordings/etc. Just because they need a "FISA court-issued warrant" to have a human being actually look at the details of the information doesn't mean they aren't storing it anyway.

Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation

Changing everything seems to be a user operation, it's as easy to get in this new box as the old

External drives? External graphics?

Thunderbolt? Which even allows for external GPU expansion...

3 display max it would seem

It's not three displays, it's up to three *4K" displays (4096 x 2160). Where you really driving six displays of that resolution before? You could drive more displays with lower resolution.

Basically it seems like you didn't bother to even read the specs for even a moment.

This lil' PCIe SSD isn't (480GB likely)

I'd guess 1TB minimum. Pro system, remember?

That still means you would need external storage for large video files but you seem to be forgetting the vale of large local fast scratch storage, like Photoshop uses and FCP will quite likely make great use of.

Unless you are doing 4:2:2 uncompressed or something

Something, like 4k/8k video something...

This is NOT some well reasoned design to make video pros happy

It is if you think beyond a year.

It should be possible to replace the GPUs as well.

Which you can also do (along with everything else) over Thunderbolt. You could also have more storage at the same speed as the internal SSD chips.

"I don't do any image, video or desktop publishing work and I also don't ever compile large projects".

If all you want is a browser buy a Chromebook. If you have real work to get done the extra speed will help - especially on writes.