Mac Pro (late 2013) replica inside a real trashcan

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.

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.

"Yep, I know why the Mac's text looks blurrier" i.e., I meant to agree with 'coldtea' and add to the discussion.

The way I've written it now makes it sound like I'm disagreeing. Anyway, the link above should be useful to future readers.

Widely held by whom? The absolute simplest thing for Apple to have done at the time would've been to have kept using OpenFirmware, for maximum compatibility with existing PowerMacs (OpenFirmware boot code is written in platform-independent Forth).

This would've made building hackintoshes much harder than EFI, since EFI motherboards were quasi available at the time and clearly going to be growing in the future, whereas OpenFirmware x86 motherboards were speciality hardware that only Apple and Sun would have been producing.

The decision to use EFI is most easily understood as a compromise between retaining some of the abilities of OpenFirmware, avoidance of 30-years of unnecessary BIOS cruft, and a desire to enable people to run Windows, which EFI BIOS compatibility could enable but OpenFirmware could not.

Seriously, it's 2004-2005. You have the opportunity to define an x86-based platform from scratch. You'd like Windows compatibility as a business selling point, but you're sane so you don't want to chain yourself to a kludge like the PC BIOS in your own code base if you don't have to, because backwards compatibility isn't a concern.

EFI is the only obvious choice.