Warranty and User Upgrades

Question

I'm thinking about buying my first Mac. I'm a power user, a programmer, and I like to tinker with my machine. I've used primarily pre-built Windows boxes over the years, though I've built one of my machines and upgraded the others a few times. I noticed that Apple hardware can be expensive, so I was thinking of buying a baseline Mac Pro system, and then upgrading the RAM (I know about the big heatsink issue) and later the HDs and video card.
How does Apple handle warranty support for when the end-user does the upgrades herself with third-party hardware? I heard that it doesn't void the warranty on the entire machine (unless it shorts out everything :P), but what if something goes wrong? How good are they at honoring the warranty and how much of my warranty will be voided as I do the upgrades?
I never really considered a Mac before because it was impossible to upgrade myself.
Mac Pro    

Answer 1

If you look at the tabs on this window, there is "Manuals" and if you click there, you will see the "DIY" Do It Yourself Guides to upgrades you can do: RAM, disk drives, PCI Express, video and optical drives. We all wonder about some of that.
It is when you modify the case, the design, or attempt to over clock memory, bus or cpu etc that you are "on your own." or use flashed components.
They have helped make it easier to run Windows, and Intel hardware supports virtualization which helps too, so you can run multiple virtual machines.
However, asking for or talking about rumors, future products and features, you won't or shouldn't find much on Apple's own Discussions. But lots of help in any and all DIY type upgrades.