Just from experience in moving spindly legs around rubble (camera tripod), I can see one potential issue the video doesn't make clear - the support struts can easily get wedged in rocks as they move around. Hopefully it can detect this before it bends a strut.

the fact that they are moving
OSX towards a mandatory App store

All they did, a few versions ago, is allow developers to sign apps, and distribute through the app store - they have made ZERO moves since then towards a "mandatory" app store.

If you think allowing developers to sign applications and having the OS ask before running anything unsigned (note that does NOT mean from the app store) is bad then you have not seen the average person's computer.

and their totally over the top pricing.

You mean like pricing a Mac Pro $2k less than you can buy the individual parts for it?

I'm typing on my
last macbook air here ever... and it's a $1200 value that sold for $2200

And how much do you think a PC is worth after a year?

Good luck with the switch but the grass is pretty much DEAD on the other side of the lawn.

Competition is good. Copying is not. That's why copyright (and to a certain extent patents) exist.

Otherwise if you spend $10 million developing something, and anyone can steal it in an hour - no-one is going to spend $10 million to develop something again.

Also, selling something that looks almost exactly someone else's product hurts everyone, because it confuses consumers.

I figured something like it had happened already...

I guess if you were really smart, you would write a miner that actually worked - but skimmed 10% off the top for the miner writer starting a week after it started running. Probably almost no-one would ever notice...

With a vendor built, a component failure means a 2 week minimum turnaround where you're out of a machine

Not with Apple, and AppleCare. If they have the same system in an Apple store often they'll just swap it out if something is really wrong...

But the way the Mac Pro is built, it would be pretty easy to swap in replacement storage or GPU or memory to fix one of those items going bad. Or two switch all your custom cards into a set of cores they had stored in the back for replacements.

He's saying Apple probably gets parts at a discount (probably because of volume) - do you really think that is NOT true?

I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals.

Well, they probably will find out they can, then they won't care.

You can upgrade the RAM, storage, and video cards. Yes they use proprietary connectors for the last two but third parties have offered upgrades for apple proprietary connectors before. It also means Apple could well offer GPU upgrades in the future.

Yet the Mac Pro is ...
a) Round

A shape chosen for better cooling characteristics - they can get away with a smaller case, and a smaller fan to cool the same components that a square case would use.

b) Shiny

This is the only one of the items that really has little practical use. Yet what case maker WANTS a butt-ugly case? And in a design shop it looks better to have better looking gear.

c) Cool looking

This is only because it's small, but small has utility too. It means it's much easier to move around, and modern workers change workspaces more frequently than they used to. Have you tried moving one of the older Mac Pros? They looked great too but you sure wanted to leave them where they were.

d) expensive

That's not even right. For what you get it's NOT expensive, which is the whole point of the Slashdot story to begin with. It gives you a lot of power at a fair price, and some people do in fact need that much power. Anyone who does not can just buy an iMac.

There are a few rich people that will buy one just for fun, sure. But most of the people buying this system will do so because they have a PRACTICAL need for the power the system offers in a smallish form factor.

when buying equivalent hardware

Even in the example that is "only" 11k instead of 10k from Apple, there were significant shortcomings in the hardware used compared to what Apple ships. It's not going to be equivalent - probably not even to the cheaper Mac Pro configurations that are just $3k-$5k.

You can replace the first two things via a PCIe card attached through Thunderbolt.

Why would you WANT to replace the fan which is perfectly tailored to the system and for noise levels?

But why would you replace the first two? It already has two GigE ports. You can get Thunderbolt to FiberChannel adaptors if that's what you were after. And it already supports a pretty modern WiFi stack, 802.11ac.

I thought that too (specced one out), but recently I found out they are in fact shipping to people already. The two months is just for new orders as they are in heavy demand...

It still may be possible to pick one up at an Apple store though.

And "forcing alternative energy" is the wrong way to look at it.

It's exactly the right way to look at it. Because that's what is happening, you are trying to throw money to artificially hurry up when solar becomes cost effective, which just doesn't work - you can only improve materials science so quickly before you are just wasting money.

also greater vulnerabilities as we just found out in Toronto with our huge ice storm outage.

Curious to hear how much power a solar panel outputs when it too is covered by inches of ice & snow.

In fact in that situation it's good 'ol gas, your car and a big-ass inverter that comes to the rescue - not solar.

There is no way that system is the same, or even close to the same as a Mac Pro. Either the storage is slower (very likely), the GPU is slower (very likely), or some other aspects are also not really the same (you say "similar" Xeon CPU).

The Mac Pro *does* have an upgradable GPU. It's proprietary but that doesn't mean Apple will not be offering an upgrade later, or that third parties may do so (they have with Apple's custom storage chip interface in the past).

It's great you can build a powerful and flexible system, but it does no-one any good to claim it is really comparable. And would it really be nearly as good as even the cheapest Mac Pro configuration?

AppleInsider had a similar article a few days ago.

Their conclusion was $14k, somewhat higher than the Slashdotted article... it would be interesting to see when it comes back up how the component choices differ from the real thing and AppleInsider's.

We already know you can replace the three major components people generally replace in systems - so it's not like you have to max out any of those three initially. Except for the fact Apple is generally charging you less than you'd have to pay on your own for that part right now...