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So my point in my prior post, which noted this isn't being made for an average home user is spot on. Yes, it's a professional workstation that's going to use expensive, niche software performing tasks that I (and perhaps you) will never do.

Great.

So again, how many of these does Apple believe they're going to sell? Seems to be a rather niche market. (I used to work for a large world renowned advertising agency in Chicago that did video pre and post editing, btw. We had maybe a handful of high end video processing systems because of their cost.)

My secondary point was that anyone (meaning any average/home user) who purchases one of these likely has more money than brains. My compute requirements do include audio & video editing & compilation, virtualization and other fairly cpu, memory and disk intensive tasks. Still, I hardly touch the 8 cores (16 threads) in my pc today. Then again it's highly unlikely I'm using software intended to take advantage of those cores and threads.

I should've qualified my statements a whole lot better than I did....

The other -- and IMO more common -- application that can use lots of cores, is running multiple OSes in one hardware box via virtualization (VMware, VirtualBox, Parallels, Xen).

Apple users very commonly run Windows in a VM. Maybe you prefer Win7, but need to run Win10 as well (this is my situation). Or you have an old copy of some special application that only works on XP. Your original "lots" of cores are down to maybe 4-6 for each VM plus the ones retained for the macOS host.

Even if you only run one VM, you've halved your original core complement.

I would bet personal (non-datacenter) virtualization is at least as big a market for a high-end iMac, as high-end engineering or video work.

I'll tell you this: sitting here FReeping with a dual-core hyperthreaded CPU (4 total virtual cores), split between my OS X host and my Win7 VM, I sure would love to have a dozen more! :-)

So again, how many of these does Apple believe they're going to sell? Seems to be a rather niche market. (I used to work for a large world renowned advertising agency in Chicago that did video pre and post editing, btw. We had maybe a handful of high end video processing systems because of their cost.)

I bet Apple will sell a lot of them. Watch and see. They aren't targeted toward the home/office market at all, but they are targeted toward the professional/technical crowd. I could use one in my office to replace our 2013 Mac Pro six core Xeon we use for 3D cone beam radiography. We could eliminate a tower Linux machine we use to render the CT scan raw data that come from the 3D PANELIPSE X-ray machine as 360 discrete slices through the skull into a manipulable, rotatable, false color 3D image showing bone, teeth, soft tissue, fillings, appliances, etc. The Mac Pro the takes that image and does the actual real time display in High-Definition, calculating on the fly the views from every angle, creating potential virtual repairs, and measurements for casting and computerized machining of implants, etc.

We could assign each of those tasks to a set of cores in one machine, one set running the Linux proprietary 3D rendering software, then storing it on the same SSD as the Display Mac Pro uses to present those data to the doctor for diagnosis. This would speed the process up by eliminating file transfers.