As of recently I am the owner of a 2013 Mac Pro.
I’m not exactly rich but needed a rather powerful workhorse to do the job, so that was quite a hefty investment. Unfortunately it seems that third party manufacturers of Mac specific accessories automatically assume that you won the lottery or have been born loaded.
Of course there are still (for Apple standards) somewhat moderately priced options, like The Flight Company’s Mac Pro Carry Bag or the Waterfield Mac Pro Go Case. Each of those are already around 100 Euros however. And if you have the need for heavy duty protection, there is the Case Cruzer Mac Pro Carrying Case, which would protect your Mac even if you accidently drop it from a flying helicopter. Roughly triple the price of the previous cases and it is yours – not the most portable but certainly the safest choice.
However, those weren’t really for me. I’m not constantly bringing my Mac along, it is not replacing my MacBook and I don’t want to bring it with me wherever I go. It is far too expensive and I don’t want to risk having anything happen to the machine that my daily work depends on. But of course occasionally I do need to transport it and I don’t really wish to use the original packaging for it all the time. The bag needed to be small enough and preferably not too obvious. So I was looking for a well padded inexpensive alternative, which proved to be more difficult than I anticipated.
Since I’m somewhat of a drummer, I figured that there might be cases for Toms that are rather long and may fit the size of the Mac Pro just perfectly. To no avail, unfortunately. While the Mac Pro does remotely resemble a drum, there doesn’t seem to be anything in that size out there – and even less a nicely padded case for it.
Not being ready to give up, I came up with another idea: since I do photography quite a fair bit and camera bags are always well padded, if I could just find something about the size of the Mac Pro for a reasonable price, that would just do the trick.
Initially I looked on eBay, but they were either too large or too small. After spending some time on Amazon however, I managed to find one that was long enough and barely too narrow for the Mac. However, most of these bags are a little stretchable, so I figured it might be a tight fit, bet on that and just ordered it. And I can say, despite it really is a tight fit (a little fiddly to get inside), it’s a perfect match.
So now I have a Mac Pro travel bag for 26 € that doubles as a camera bag. And it can fit a Buffalo LinkStation Pro Quad as well (not at the same time though). Quite a reasonable choice.
May I present the winner of the day: Amazon Basics DSLR Bag Large
