2013 Mac Pro inspired Dune Case: For better or worse, It just had to happen.

Dune Case is a kickstarter project whose goal is to build a cylindrical PC case, suspiciously similar to Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro. According to the owner of Dune Case LLC, the company behind the kickstarter, the case is “...smaller than the average PC case, but big in customization potential...”.

While the exterior is almost identical to the Mac Pro, both in dimensions and color, the internals of the case are designed to host a mini-ITX motherboard, and a limited number of peripherals, including two SSDs and a graphic card, in a more conventional configuration, which tries, very hard, to squeeze an internal set of hardware components within a cylinder, instead of a parallelepiped.

While one can see the wow-factor in building a customized PC that looks like a Mac Pro, the sad truth is that such shape makes sense only within the proprietary design of the Mac Pro’s internals, where the logic board and other components are more efficiently arranges in an array, and most of the components are fused with the logic board, including the GPU.

A mini-ITX board is flat and rectangular, and capabilities, in regard to expandability and “customization potential”, are rather limited by the cylindrical shape of the case, which does not allow, for instance, high-power GPU options, such as a full-size GTX graphic card, or similar.

The Dune Case does not only emulates the shape of the Mac Pro’s enclosure, but also its top-side ventilation system. It’s unclear whether the built-in cooling system inside the case provides for sufficient flow to keep all internals from overheating, as the illustrations provided on the kickstarter page offer a view of a system, that seems a little too cramped, when looking at how little space there is for the overhead fan to optimally dissipate heat.

Another potential problem is dust particles, entering from the bottom of the unit, which is comprised of an array of holes. It’s easy to guess that any amount of dust that is sucked in through those inlets, will have to travel quite a ways to reach the top, granted that it does. By this token, one has to wonder how long it takes for this type of case to fill up with dust particles, before it turns the entire unit into a vacuum bag.

Will Apple sue?

While there might be a chance that Apple could sue on grounds of copyright infringement, due to the obvious design similarities with the original Mac Pro, this product isn’t marketed as a PC, but rather as an accessory, as Dune Case LLC owner Alexander Gomez points out:

“...We have received numerous questions and comments regarding Dune Case’s aesthetics and whether we considered this prior to Kickstarter. Please be assured, we did our due diligence. It would be foolish not to.

Dune Case is just a case, not a computer. Prior art exists for cylindrical cases designs pre-2013. We refined our design to support mini-ITX components....”