Forget the New Mac Pro and Build Yourself This Raspberry Pi Cheese Grater

The upcoming Apple Mac Pro is definitely powerful and has been generating a lot of buzz. Unfortunately, most of that buzz is about the…

Cameron Coward
5 years ago

The upcoming Apple Mac Pro is definitely powerful and has been generating a lot of buzz. Unfortunately, most of that buzz is about the price and the odd “cheese grater” design. Despite those factors, many professionals are going to be buying the new Mac Pro for its tremendous power coming from up to 28 CPU cores. With so much processing power at your fingertips, you can render high-quality models quicker than ever. Or, you can just use your old Mac Pro to do the renders, wait a bit long, and watch the progress on the iCanWait remote desktop.

The most notable feature of the iCanWait alternative to the Apple Mac Pro is that it’s built into an actual cheese grater. That’s important, because it will fool all of your peers into thinking you’ve shelled out the money for the new Mac Pro, which reportedly starts at $6,000 and goes all the way up to $35,000 for the top-spec build. That is an almost absurd amount of money to pay just to render things more quickly. So save the money and use a cloud service, or continue to use your old Mac Pro for the job — remember how fast it felt when you first bought it?

If you’re taking the latter route, the iCanWait lets you view your desktop while it chugs along so you can do other things. It’s housed within a Mainstays 9" cheese grater, and runs on a Raspberry Pi with a 3.5" LCD display. All you have to do is load up Raspbian and setup a remote desktop viewer for your old Mac Pro. Then cut an appropriately-sized hole in your cheese grater for the LCD display. The total build cost should be well under $75, and you can use all of that extra cash you saved to build your own server farm to handle all of your rendering needs.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist.
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