These are my own hazy opinions, but I suspect it starts at &quot;<i>Wallet vaporizes from shock</i>&quot; and goes up from there.<p>I remember reading about how old IBM mainframes used to have a couple ThinkPads (literally two, for redundancy) bolted just inside the cabinet door, just to change low-level configuration settings. It seems to me that these POWER8 boxen are aimed toward that end of the market.<p>YouTube&#x27;s history interface is terrible, but I managed to dig this out - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jOzPTopt7HE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jOzPTopt7HE</a> - which shows the different discrete components in a POWER8 system and how they&#x27;re put together. I should probably do a bit more research on this, that video is quite basic (and 2 years old now).<p>POWER8 systems seem to necessarily take up a lot of space, and not does this contributes to the raw material cost, it&#x27;s also a factor in renting, considering that you can pack a basic but decent punch with 1U or 2U of x86. My guess is that IBM isn&#x27;t trying to be competitive here, but aim for a specific market. That&#x27;ll influence the price too.<p>It&#x27;s thanks to market factors and the state of education (which sometimes produces wins like these!) that places like PTOpenLab exist, I think (again, this is an [un]educated guess), and I&#x27;m super appreciative that they do. I haven&#x27;t figured out how the &quot;blue points&quot; system works yet though (you get 500, and use 10&#x2F;day for running a VM); I can at least say that the number doesn&#x27;t increase each day. I vaguely recall reading something to the effect of creating HDD images for the platform would give you points based on how many other people downloaded them (there&#x27;s somewhere you can upload to), but I can&#x27;t find that documentation now.<p>Another fun tidbit: the dashboard UI is based on SmartAdmin (a premium jQuery plugin, apparently), which comes with Chrome-compatible voice control (note the mic button at the top-right). The voice command list doesn&#x27;t show because of a 404, but you can find the list in app.config.js (F12 -&gt; Network -&gt; reload page) - scroll to the pile of &quot;show&quot;s. Useless, and horribly flaky, but extremely cool. :D