Yes, because he does not have an assembly factory. He is just a modder. And it is a trashcan. And parts he used are probably not built to be put inside a trashcan. It is cheaper and he has a compact computer. Maybe it is good enough for him, and he can carry it around easily?

When thinking about the merits of the mod, there aren't any. You can get mini computer cases for cheap, and they would work much, much better than his trashcan. So what we're left with is the "look a trashcan looks like the Mac Pro" joke with a more literal application, which is, as I said, kind of funny. Though who's to say a trash can isn't well designed?

Edit Since the link switched to the original forum post with more pictures: I must say the project was quite impressive and the end result is cool, though I still stand by my original point.

Well I would not doubt clones of the case will appear, many lan boxes are very small and can be made smaller.

The trick of the MacPro is the integration of the AMD video which isn't something a modder is going to do.

I didn't look - apart from making it pretty, what did Apple do with video beyond a PCIe x16 riser (like http://linitx.com/product/pci-express-x16-gen2-flexi-riser-7...)?

They have some custom pcb motherboard in there, a simple mini-itx one would have to pass through that central column and the ram would be sticking out on the same side.

It's now obvious you are taking this build way too literally. If he wanted a Mac Pro he would have bought one. This build is not cost saving if you figure in the labor to invent every element in the complete unit. He did it as a novelty and an homage. No it not as well build as the real thing.

To be quite honest, I think the new mac pro's design is on the ugly side from an internal standpoint. There are existing standards for things like small form factor graphics interface, like MXM, that seem like they would work much better than apple's variant which requires a rather frail looking connector between the graphics cards and the I/O card. Though I imagine one of the problems there is that it would be much harder for Apple to keep people from purchasing a third-party video card two years down the road when the current boards start getting long in the tooth.

The interesting thing about the Pro is the heat management & power in such a small form factor. I have yet to see a Pro IRL, but reports indicate that it is very quiet for such a powerful machine.

The last tower machine I had years ago was loud and doubled as a room heater in winter. I still see video cards being made that require their own heat sink and fan. Then add all the other standard fans: power supply, CPU (+ heat sink), one or two on the case. You have these huge empty, inefficient boxes.

I really hope Apple brings their heat management knowledge to their other lines.

Edit: grammar.

Why compare a box you had a few years ago to the new Mac Pro? Today you can put amazing performance in mini itx or micro atx cases.[1] Granted Apples custom design still offers some space savings but also zero upgradability. Of course those small standard cases aren't made for xeon CPUs and Dual GPUs, but most people that buy/need powerful workstations do not really care about the size of the thing.

[1] https://teksyndicate.com/videos/build-most-powerful-mini-itx...

I get things are better now. I type this on a 2013 Macbook Air. This is my main, personal dev machine. I understand the levels of improvement we have achieved.

But Apple has a truly novel design with the new Pro. Even the machine in your link has 1 CPU fan, 1 GPU fan and a power supply fan. And it's still quite empty and not that small. No one except Apple is even trying.

>Granted Apples custom design still offers some space savings but also zero upgradability.

Zero upgradability? The Mac Pro is quite upgradable, with the exception of the GPU. It got a 8/10 from iFixit in this area.

Depends what you mean by upgradability, my main dev and gaming rig is watercooled. It is so silent the only noise detectable is the spindle HDDs.

I can slam in another PCIe SSD RAID next year and hopefully get rid of those too.

The Mac Pro of course can't slam in a PCIe RAID, you have only thunderbolt, which isn't as fast as a 16 lane. You have no ability to choose graphics cards made by third parties, my box just has reference design ones, with ek blocks on them for the cooling. Of course this means changing the graphics card takes 1 hour, then letting it "leak test" in the bathroom for a night. I would still say it's upgradable, but clearly I've traded ease for silence and performance (you can generally get very reliable over clocks with such cooling).

This is why people complain it isn't upgradable. You can't easily put in anything you want, it has to go external, which is fine for some, but abhorrent for others. The options of what you can upgrade are entirely a single vendor lock-in. Some people dislike that. These people (such as myself) like to have a free market of competition and innovation on every component available.

Replacing the SSD and RAM is not "upgradable."

Being able to replace the PSU, GPGPU, 5.25" drives and 3.5" drives is upgradable. Expansion will have to be entirely done through external PCIe chassis, and TB2 is NOT as fast as PCIe3. It's such an inelegant solution and very half-assed.

I don't just want an engineering marvel on my desk. I want it to be pragmatic and easy to expand. Using the excuse that most machines are going the other way is not viable – this is a professional machine, and every professional has different standards.

I think you hit the nail on the head. This is a professional machine, and the professionals it is aimed and, that are going to be buying this machine, are not interested in upgradability in the sense you talking about.

Find a good price/performance ratio, buy and use machine for 2-3 years, sell and buy a new one. The fact that this machine houses all the components you want to upgrade inside of it (CPU,GPU,RAM,PSU) and all the components you want to keep outside (NAS/RAID primarily), makes this prospect that much better, less waste.

Not to mention the usually excellent value retention on Apple hardware makes this a pretty darn good investment. Again, if you are in the target market that is.

Video cards require their own heat sinks and fans because the average video card these days uses more power at peak than a CPU. However, video cards these days also tend to have the same sorts of power throttling that most cpu fans have these days, so tower boxes are a lot more quiet than they were a few years back. Also, there are a lot of different case sizes even in the area of "tower"s, with many of the higher end ones being very quiet even at full power. Also, for super-quiet computing, there are companies that make fanless power supplies now, or for those really concerned about silence, there are water cooling setups that use their big radiator, and a large, slow fan, to quietly cool the gpus and cpu in a modern system.

They're quite. I was able to test one at a Mac Store, some people in there, but in general feels like the machine isn't ON.

Well, OTOH the Mac Pro does have use replacable CPU, HD and memory for what is worth. It got a 8/10 user-servisability score at iFixit, which is very good for a device of this size and design.

And it can also use thunderbolt based GPUs. But if your work justifies a $3K dual-GPU machine, would you really go about replacing graphics cards 2-3 years down the road, instead of just buying the latest model? It would have new-everything, and it would be a tax deductible busines expense after all.

A connector like MXM isn't enough to handle the sort of bandwidth those cards need to move. They need PCI-e and multiple DisplayPort channels as the ports are not on the video cards, but instead on the back panel.

So modder gets close to fit/finish with his hands and then its not good enough cause the "insides"... which you can't see BTW is the real good stuff is. Design can be just for design sake and not for technical or mechanical superiority.

Your thought train is living somewhere between these: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/special-pleading

The fallacy-pointing was just an explanation of why the poster above may be wrong. But if you look closely, there is a paragraph above the one with the fallacies. And, lo and behold, that paragraph contains arguments which are not of the "argument from fallacy" type.

Please review them, prove them wrong, and then we'll speak.

Well, 'beautiful' is to a certain extent a subjective quality. 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful is X' can be interpreted as 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful to me is X', and that's not really a statement that you can argue against.

But even so, the fallacies are either stretched or completely inapplicable. Both the 'no true scotsman' and 'special pleading' fallacies involve constantly shifting goalposts, but we've only ever seen Jormundir say that internal design is part of what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful. Where are the shifting goalposts?

Like, I don't think that the fact that it's not beautiful on the inside is relevant to the fact that it's a cool as hell mod; I think it's completely irrelevant. But throwing fallacies at the statement is just weird. I don't get how they apply at all.

Fallacies are irrelevant because there's no reasoning going on here -- the person you're responding to is making a subjective opinion statement, not a formal (or even informal) argument about aesthetics. Their statement doesn't even have a warrant or grounds, so to attack it with a fallacy is nonsensical.

Please stop quoting irrelevant fallacies. Jeez.

I disagree. It's not as nice as the real Mac Pro, but what this modder made, even inside, is really impressive and quite cool looking. I'm impressed, anyway.

I don't know. He did a really good job on the outside. His job replicating the look of the grill on the bottom was a great touch.

But inside, it was just a bog-standard Mini-ITX, standard graphics card, etc. Before I clicked on the link I was hoping to see something more unique.

Two of the neatest things about the new Mac Pro are it's size and silence. This mod is bigger (not surprising), but why not go further? If the enclosure was bigger you could have simulated the triangle layout of the Mac Pro and put something interesting down the middle.

Or you could work to make the machine quieter with some elaborate heat-pipe or water-cooling setup. I have a feeling the small graphics and CPU fans in that metal case make a fair amount of noise.

I guess I was expecting something much more exotic, maybe using a small single board computer (Beagle Bone or Raspberry Pi) or something else strange.

It looks nice considering the constraints of using normal PC hardware. Apple went back to the drawing board with the Mac Pro, I guess I'm a bit disappointed by this being 'just' a round case.

Nobody sees the inside so its kind of like they did it to justify the price. In my opinion the Mac Pro/All Macs would be a lot more interesting if I knew I could install any OS I want on it without a performance loss and it was officially allowed by Apple.

As far as I know, various Unix versions, as well as Win7, will run just fine. No artificial performance penalties, and Apple is currently doing precisely NOTHING to disallow installation of alternate OSes. This has been the case for years.

Except getting macbook to boot anything else than OSX or Windows requires bunch of stuff that I can only describe as 'hacks'. At least it was like so couple years ago (http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12037.html) and I haven't heard that things would be different today.

Try booting a Linux install USB on a Mac sometime

Running Linux installed by this method on a (2008) Mac right now. Have done the same on recent (2012, 2013) models, too.

Macs have been using EFI boot for a few years, so the problem most have probably faced is trying to boot in BIOS emulation mode (which I've found to be iffy on pretty much every EFI motherboard I've come across).

Arch Linux has particularly good support. :P

I did, a few months ago. Booted both Fedora 19 and 20 Beta on a 2012 13" rMBP. Worked decently well, especially with how the version of Gnome included in F20 knows how to properly deal with high DPI displays.

Hasn't worked for me at all no matter how I create the USB, working with a 2011 MBP. Tried literally every method, and several distros.

I've had good luck booting Fedora (at least 19 and 20, and I think 18) on Macs.

Other distros don't seem to work with Apple's EFI implementation. To boot other distros, I've had good luck with the refind[1] bootloader. Granted, I have only been booting live USBs, not installing on the internal drive.

1: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

You can and you won't and it is. Performance issues are from the fact that other OS's don't support the hardware properly.

Well, considering the fact that Apple made a program called "Bootcamp" which simplifies the process of installing Windows on your machine, I'd say other OSes are officially allowed by Apple.

In fact, I have Win7, OS 10.9, and Arch Linux on this computer (early 2013 MBP Retina)

The IT guy in my building claims "MBP's are the best Windows laptops on the market." I'm probably not in a position to say whether or not it's true, but it seems to be at least a defensible position.

Which building?

If/when I get one, I'm going to run it without the shiny exterior as much as possible. That thing is too shiny and I much prefer the aesthetic of PC boards and parts on a Pro machine. (Then again I run my Windows tower with the sides off too, though that's because I was too lazy to hook up the power button and front USB ports.)

It has a sensor that disallows running it with the case off. Disabling the sensor would void the warranty. Not saying nobody will do it, because I'm quite certain someone will (or already has?).

But you'll probably have to actually spring for your _own_ MacPro to mod the sensor.

Thermal design might rely on a laminar air flow inside the cylinder and taking the case off could result in increased tempatures. Of course we will only know if someone tries it and reports the measured temperatures.

Well this is quite useful to know. I'm going to hope, then, that I can build or buy a clear plastic version of the casing. :)

This one is interesting, I'm on the fence about it though. I have a Hackintosh (i5 3470k,16gb,2X GTX660TI SLI) inside of a G5 case. The interesting thing about the older Mac Pro is they did not really change the design for so many years and you can pickup a empty G5 case for $70-100 on ebay. Only slight modifications are needed to make it work with PC components.