Culture
I wanted to see someone skate Apple's $700 Mac Pro wheels. Braille Skateboarding delivered.
Unbox Therapy put the idea in our minds. Then Aaron Kyro and crew took it to the next level.
About a week ago, a video dropped in Slack that seemed to be the perfect intersection of my interests: “I took Apple's $700 wheels and made a skateboard.” Oh? We, along with the rest of the world, have been ripping on the absurdly priced Mac Pro Wheels Kit for some time now — it is, after all, part of a build that can run you over $50,000 with the specs maxed out — and I thirst for any and all skate content. Interest piqued, I clicked through Unbox Therapy’s video looking for stills of the wheels installed on anything rideable and, more importantly, the part where someone tries to skate this comically bougie setup. And we almost got that.
But we needed more — Host Lew Hilsenteger assembles his setup using the cheese grater-style front panel of a Mac Pro replica as the deck and Apple’s new $700 Mac Pro wheels. There are no trucks and there are definitely questions as to whether or not it can hold the weight of an adult human. In other words, it looks extremely sketchy, like a recipe for eating shit, and I wanted nothing more than to see it in action.
Despite Unbox Therapy’s commendable attempt, the end result was something very safe — confirmation that you can stand on it plus a few cautious pushes. It was fun, but it didn’t really answer the question of whether or not you can actually skate these ridiculous wheels.
‘It’s like a Cadillac’ — I shouted my call for more recklessness into the void (aka, Slack) and, to my surprise, Aaron Kyro answered. On Tuesday, the popular YouTuber behind Braille Skateboarding dropped his answer to Unbox Therapy’s video: “I took Apple’s $700 wheels and made a (better) skateboard.”
And this time around, we get to see Apple’s wheels on a real deck, with and without trucks. It’s exactly the swiveling nightmare you’d imagine.
"It's funny, in his video, he was like 'I'm going to only use things that are around the shop.' So are we. We just happen to have skateboards," Kyro says at the start, after giving a shoutout to Unbox Therapy for the idea.
"I'm just going to do, like, a standard unboxing, which I don't even know what that actually means," he adds.
In retrospect we should have seen this coming; Braille has long run a series called Skate Everything in which Kyro and crew skate… well, everything. That includes a Tesla Model S door, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (hardcover, of course), a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, and a Nintendo Switch. A set of overpriced computer wheels seems like a given.
It's a lot of fun — The original video planted the seed of this idea and Braille brought it to life. We get several trick attempts, a successful kickflip, and some mildly stressful drop-ins. There’s hardware damage, a few falls, and dogs, which is always a plus.
I can't think of a better use for $700 wheels.