Ah, didn't know the door was hiding the HDDs, that's pretty cool idea. I think I'll reserve judgement over how easy installation actually is until I see a video of the installation process. With most SFF cases, I feel like building in them is rather complicated and cumbersome, most often components have to be mounted in a specific order.
A mesh is certainly good enough to hide the fan somewhat. I was a bit worried that the red fan blades would be directly visible, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With design patents, devices of different kinds are never relevant. IIRC, the main point of them is to prevent potential customers from being misled. For example, there is a smartphone called S4 Mini (which contains NFC technology) which is a trademark of Samusng, but the NFC S4 Mini doesn't violate that trademark as no potential customer could possibly think it was the same thing. The two products exist in different sectors. The question now is whether the two sectors of PCs and PC cases are actually closely related enough to allow a lawsuit to even be considered sensible, something lawyers have to fight about.
While I'm not one either, I'm pretty sure that not copying all aspects of a patents, but some, can be problematic. Especially as Apples legal team is probably damn hard to beat if you're not a comparably large business yourself.
That's what I actually meant by design patent, but I think what EdZ posted fits your claims, at it also talks about surface finishing of the Mac Pro.
Good point, though. At first, this might just get pulled from crowdfunding because the platform doesn't want to deal with it. The question after that is, of course, whether and how you should pursue marketing this case.
