They're evaluation boards and have lots of thngs we'd likely never need or use, such as all thise PCI-X slots (do you know where to get affordable cards to use those slots?) or all those ethernet ports. This thing might make a good server, but for the consumer likes of us it's an awful lot of unusable stuff. I'd rather see something with emerging consumer standards like PCI-Express than useless PCI-X slots... It's also a power monster which is also my complaint about the recent Cell motherboard discussions. Such huge heatsinks wuld make it difficult or impossible to do something smaller like the MicroA1 until they can get power consumption of the CPU and chipset lowered. (ie. won't work with Project Reality case or other small Mini-ITX cases)
There had been an attempt to work with this company to redesign it into something more to our needs, the Amiga 5 project or something like that. That guy was taking donations to buy one of the $6000 eval kits (required before you can buy further boards at the lower $4500 price). It didn't work out and as I understand he returned all the donations.
I don't think you'll get anything on par with Apple's prices. They manufacture in the 100,000s... Lots of 500 or 1000 simply cannot get the price breaks on components that Apple does, that's much of why Eyetech's boards are priced as they are.
