I think we fit the type of institution quite nicely that this article describes. We too have made heavy investments into Apple and their work stations and I too have been worried about the future of product availability. For the most part, the iMac does meet our daily needs but there are some advanced application to where our 4 year old Mac Pro Towers still out perform even the brand new iMac. I don’t expect that to be the case for much longer though.
Where do we go from here? That is my challenge in working with Apple.
Apple did address this in an email
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6001/apple-confirms-email-to-mac-pro-users-about-something-really-great-in-2013
But no matter how great the new product will be, the problem is that you can’t plan for it.
Throughout the history of Apple, they have forced users to Think Different (also known as change everything you know.) When they switched to the G3 computers in the mid 90′s and killed off the floppy and serial ports, everyone thought it was the end of the world. I guess it kind of was the end of the computing world, as we knew it. But now, we don’t miss floppies at all. SCSI was next. I really don’t miss that. The change to OSX also forced some big changes. They attacked optical media a little more slowly (starting with the Air), and now it looks like they may be have PCI Expansion Ports in their crosshairs. Expansion is huge for professionals, but I would guess that Apple looks at Thunderbolt as external PCI.
I guess that a couple years down the road, we either won’t miss optical and PCI at all, or we won’t be using Macs.