A top-spec Mac Mini is pretty beastly at $1500. I have no doubt it would chew up and spit out the vast majority of workstation use cases. 2.6 GHz Quad-core i7, 16 GB RAM, SSD.
The only thing I can possibly imagine would be some seriously high-end 3D rendering or massively parallel simulation software.
To the OPs point, there is zero reason to get the Mac Pro over even a Mac Mini.
Seems like there's a hole in Apple's lineup. You can't get a discrete GPU without a monitor attached (iMac) or spending >$3000. Not that it matters much for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. which are not GPU-parallelizable anyway. At least not yet.
These best part of the post is Tim Bray's response, where he says he would keep PUT and DELETE because they're idempotent, but declined to defend the rest.
One of the courses I took as an elective in my first semester in a Master's in CS program was a course in Human-Computer Interaction, which included user testing off-campus.
It was the second-most useful course I took, after a great "studio-format" software engineering course, which itself emphasized a number of soft skills such as writing and presenting.
The only thing I can possibly imagine would be some seriously high-end 3D rendering or massively parallel simulation software.
To the OPs point, there is zero reason to get the Mac Pro over even a Mac Mini.
Seems like there's a hole in Apple's lineup. You can't get a discrete GPU without a monitor attached (iMac) or spending >$3000. Not that it matters much for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. which are not GPU-parallelizable anyway. At least not yet.