So apart from the pleasure of being able to use MacOS, I presume it will be cheaper to just put these parts together myself, yes?
If the form factor is just a tower, well I can buy a tower myself. What is the advantage of paying for Apple a (presumed) bunch of money to build it for you?
If you don't want the hassle of building a PC (which is fair) there are an endless supply of places that will put PCs together for you, with (I'm presuming) a much smaller cut than Apple.
The amount of time I’ve had to fiddle with my audio/video editing beast of a hackintosh tower is quite insane really.
Both necessary and well worth it, as Apple simply wasn’t selling anything appropriately powerful for like five years (also why x99 was so tricky until more recently - no equivalent hardware of theirs), but by any other calculation if you actually put the value of your own time anywhere close to any professional scale (or see it as a hobby) it will very likely end up costing way more to do yourself.
I could understand that you would want a proper Mac for work. But I think that time is well worth spending on a personal machine, especially when it is easier nowadays.
Actually those server boards and CPU's from Intel are pretty darn expensive, as well as the fancy RAM etc. For it's specs, I think technically it is an OK price, but obviously for almost all other purposes you can custom build a PC for a fraction of the price yes, that's still really powerful. If you know how to hackintosh you can run Mac OS too.
But yeah it's to get Mac OS, that's how it's always worked, and the Apple workstations have always been at the high price segment, from the early G3, G4 days too.
If the form factor is just a tower, well I can buy a tower myself. What is the advantage of paying for Apple a (presumed) bunch of money to build it for you?
If you don't want the hassle of building a PC (which is fair) there are an endless supply of places that will put PCs together for you, with (I'm presuming) a much smaller cut than Apple.