The mechanics of this are pretty neat. But the photography in the article is incredibly distracting. Does every shot have to be at an off-kilter angle? If this is a story about engineering, how about some head-on shots of the engineered thing.
I get that the Mac Pro is a beautiful object, but this isn't about the mac. It's about the rack, and none of these photos let me understand it in one shot.
We added another wider shot of the chassis, but here are two others that didn't go in to hopefully give you a better sense of how the chassis actually looks:
(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article)
I had originally intended there to be a totally disassembled chassis with an airflow overlay on top, but it turned into a lot of work. All of the chassis were already assembled by the time we took the pictures.
The high level view is that air is drawn in to the vent on the front right, which has a separate channel that all 4 Pros sit in. They are sealed in place, so the air has to pass into each Pro's air intake to go anywhere. The other side of the chassis is open to the back of the rack and holds each Pro's exhaust vent.
I'll go through the photos we took and see if there's something that would help to illustrate this better.
I get that the Mac Pro is a beautiful object, but this isn't about the mac. It's about the rack, and none of these photos let me understand it in one shot.