The Wheels on the new Mac Pro don't have locks. They cost $550 | Hacker News Reader

The Wheels on the new Mac Pro don't have locks. They cost $550

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64 pointsfortran7725 comments

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I recently replaced some crappy (single pole) casters on my miter saw table. I found a set of four on Amazon for about $25. They are quite nice, very solid, attach by 4 screws each, have 4" hard rubber wheels, swivel and all have brakes which is very nice for making the table stable when stationary.

A few years ago I needed to replace 2 of the 4 casters on my filing cabinet. I lived in China at the time, and bought new casters on Taobao.

The total cost for 5 casters, including delivery, was 35 RMB, equivalent to around 6 USD.

Having recently learned this lesson myself the hard way with my table saw, I'll definitely echo that its important to have casters that have both a wheel lock AND a swivel lock.

Swivel lock by itself is fine on four wheeled objects because you can lock the casters at different angles so no one caster can roll without making the others slide. It's rare to find casters that are swivel lock but not wheel lock since it's easy to make a mechanism that does both.

...I just realized after finally clicking, that by locks, the headline means the wheels don't have a simple mechanism to prevent rolling.

I was thinking until now the implication was that the wheels should have locks in the sense of keyed hardware to prevent theft, since they're worth $550.

They're worth $30. They sell for $550.

If you steal these wheels, and expect a fence to move them for you, expect to get laughed at. If it were good business, they would already be ordering counterfeit Apple-mimicking casters from China for $10 and selling them for $479.

Surely the user is just rolling it wrong.

i feel people have some urge to buy anything if they see apple logo no matter how much price label they places on their product. Don't know why people have this urge.

I just don't see why this would even have wheels.

So what if they cost $550 ?

The target audience are companies and professionals who have no qualms dropping $40k on a workstation.

Its not objectively wrong. If Apple can sell their product at this price that's great for Apple. It feels wrong because Apple position themselves as a manufacturer of high-end-but-worth-the-price goods where you aren't just spending money on a logo. That produces a strange dissonance here because it's impossible to imagine how 4 casters could be worth about $137.50 each, and that's compounded by the fact they're worse than $5 casters that lock in place.

The answer is it doesn't matter what they're worth or how much it costs because people are free to make their own decisions

What was the question ?

"I don't remember the question, but I know the answer."

I feel like market research has gotten significantly better, but a blinkered focus on it is destroying brands. It may be a fairly predictable pattern that the most lucrative customers are the worst people, the most gullible, badge obsessed stereotypes who just want to show off. And a brand might not have been defined by them completely, but once it starts having that association, and the data shows that is where the most money can be made, nobody can maintain any other vision for the brand. It's kind of like the classic dilemma of a company facing disruptive innovation, where they can't respond even when everyone can see what's coming.

Plus a lot of them are architects, with perfectly level concrete floors.

Architects != concrete workers. And most concrete floors have a slight slope to make draining water simple.

Is that true indoors not in a shower?

IIRC, it's true on the floor of the Pantheon, which is stone (atop what I think is roman concrete). The floor slopes towards a point below the oculus, where a drain in the floor has been placed to get rid of rainwater. That said, I doubt anyone will be parking a new Mac Pro there anytime soon.

Sorry, missed this initially. It's not a code requirement. However, it makes cleaning concrete floors dead simple (hose + squeegee), so it's incredibly common in rental spaces where the finished floor is sealed concrete.

The real question is what has Apple done to prevent people from using a $10 set of four plain black nylon casters instead of the $550 official casters with the brushed aluminum "Apple look"--that are still missing a very basic feature of a $20 set of furniture casters.

Even the fancy ball casters with faux-antique bronze finish and soft rubber treads are only about $12 each. A heavy-duty top-plate caster, with solid nylon wheel and dual ball bearings, and brake--all the bells, and all the whistles--might run $30 each.

It's so audaciously greedy that it's insulting to people who wouldn't even consider buying it.

You could even put your Mac in a top-of-the-line toddler stroller for $300, and that would be forward compatible with your next crazily-pampered desktop computer.

I wonder if Apple would void your warranty if you use those and they find out.

In the US, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act prevents exactly that (unless the reason for the warranty claim is caused specifically by the aftermarket part).

https://www.sema.org/sema-enews/2011/01/ftc-validates-right-...

I wonder if Apple just doesn’t want to bother producing those wheels?

Because I, a potential consumer of Apple's other products, shouldn't have to think about whether I fall into this strange grey-area where it is apparently ok to be gouged.

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