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Comment by csmuk | Hacker News Reader

Two things to consider:

1. home built PC market is probably larger than the entire Mac market. I don't have any figures to back this up but based on Windows' market share and my experience, 20% of PC's I've seen over the years are home built.

2. Those "home built" PCs are also built and sold by PC shops as complete computers, not necessarily home builders. My father ran a business that built OEM white box PCs for 15 years. He sold over 200,000 units.

There is going to be some overlap. Particularly as most of the killer apps are entirely cross platform.

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home built PC market is probably larger than the entire Mac market. I don't have any figures to back this up but based on Windows' market share and my experience, 20% of PC's I've seen over the years are home built.

As (presumably) a home PC builder, 20% of the PC's you seen over the being home built doesn't imply much about the rest of the world...

The reason why there isn't much overlap is that workstations are often used in a professional setting by designers, where spending $3000 on a computer isn't considered a great deal. Home built PCs are rarer in this context.

Actually I use a ThinkPad and an HP Z820.

I work in financial services sector and we serve desktop and web apps. Bar large businesses, we see a LOT of home built and OEM PCs.

I was involved in the family business OEM sector for the best part of 20 years as well from a hardware perspective. There are two types of professional: careless and obsessive. The latter build their own. The distribution I saw was about 40% OEM/home built to 60% big manufacturer.

Do you have any non-anecdotal numbers? I had a quick search and couldn't find any.

I wouldn't class a professional who builds her own PC as obsessive, I would just classify her as someone for whom the time/money divide is biased towards available time. When I used to home build in the 90s I was in the same bracket. Nowadays it would make no more sense to me than doing my own plumbing.

> home built PC market is probably larger than the entire Mac market. I don't have any figures to back this up but based on Windows' market share and my experience, 20% of PC's I've seen over the years are home built.

How does this make the release of a chassis relevant to the release of a Mac Pro? The chassis doesn't even have the interesting characteristics of the Mac Pro chassis. I was hoping it might be something like that, but alas. The fact that a market is sizable doesn't make it universally relevant.

> There is going to be some overlap.

There is bound to be some overlap between Mac users and people who eat at McDonalds (both groups are large enough that it's inevitable), but that overlap isn't enough to make comments about McDonalds relevant to stories about the Mac Pro.

I think it's justifiable derision on the basis the box is pretty as well.

The market side is interesting because the case depicted is probably a more relevant release. It'll see it's way into many more OEM and home built computers than the Mac Pro.

While clearly looks are subjective, and Lian Li cases are better looking than many of their competitors, I really doubt the linked case is going to find itself in any design museums.

As for sales numbers, I've no idea how many units of this case they will be selling. If it's more than ~300,000 units a year then that would indeed be more than the Mac Pro from a couple of years ago. Of course we might expect the new model to sell better.

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