That's nice and all. But I'd much rather just build PCs in-house for work. It is just a serviceability issue. These systems often incorporate nonstandard power supplies, motherboards and such, making it difficult to repair and in many cases, impossible to upgrade piecemeal. Since building my most recent work PC in 2012, I have: Upgraded the memory. Added hard drives, including a couple SSDs recently. Upgraded the pow…
For a PC to use at home, I agree 100%. If you're the kind of person that's likely to upgrade RAM or components I wouldn't recommend this for personal use. This is geared toward enterprise use. Think, corporate IT department that needs to support dozens of these. They want a service contract and they'll probably replace the lot of them in five years. Having some weird proprietary components in there isn't a problem. A…
Generally by the time anyone would want to upgrade anything in the system it was time for a new system anyway. It did save on initial costs of each machine, and made replacing individual parts easier.
There were roughly 80-100 of these in service at anyone time, built in batches of ten refreshed normally when someone complained.
I don't think this system would have kept scaling though, it took roughly 2 hours just to build assuming no issues. RMA for failed parts took awhile, and meant that more time spent fixing it. The hours were starting to add up when I left, and I can't imagine they continued.