All of their mechanical CAD? No- some of that is handled in Shapr (https://www.shapr3d.com/). Given the state of the industry and the discussion in many sibling comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if this share is growing. A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app, and from my own personal experience I can tell you that I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience than any of its gargantuan antiquated peers.
> A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app....
It is no secret that Apple work closely with various well-known app developers, and in the case of Shapr they are even featured on the Apple developer site[1].
And it sounds like the collaborative efforts are paying off given your statement "I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience". :)
I understand the need for it to be in Siemens NX, but do they really run it in Windows VMs? As far as I know NX isn't certified to run in VMs without Nvidia GPU passthrough (aka Macs). It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.
Yeah, a couple years ago (sorry, no citation handy) I wasn't too surprised to learn that a Windows desktop can run faster in a VM on Intel Mac hardware than directly on a similarly-priced PC.
That was my experience during the Intel Mac era, when I did a lot of Windows development inside of a Mac VM.
IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.
So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use"
The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought.
Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.
I used to work with several Apple MEs, and one EE, when they moved to the startup I was at.
They were all very skilled and pragmatic engineers. While there is some tribal knowledge benefits to getting really fluent with a given CAD suite, foundationally they are just tools, so when our startup migrated from one CAD suite to another, there was pretty minimal churn. You only have to go through one project management software changeover to realize that good operators, engineers or PMs or whatever, aren't permanently affected by the particular choice of software (but they are affected by constant change in that choice). The fundamentals don't change, even if the selector switch moves from one side to the other.
At the same startup, in the early days, I had a System76 laptop running their flavor of Ubuntu, and I used KiCad (but that was prior to their big UX overhaul so it was pretty painful) so I could design the few PCBs we needed. When we adopted Altium, I dual-booted the laptop. Later, I used a MacBook Pro and I ran Altium in a VM, and I've never had a more mind-bending computing experience than when I had Windows (running Altium) on one screen, OSX (with all of my firmware dev tools) on the other screen, and my keyboard shortcuts (down to cmd vs ctrl as the modifier) would change based on which screen my mouse cursor was on.
Only if the marketplace makes sense. They can't just roll their own CAD system to use internally - mostly because it's a huge space and it requires working with external stakeholders/vendors
Shapr is probably a decent candidate for this, though maybe in a few years. It feels like they are the Pixelmator to Autodesk's Photoshop (Fusion). Though I don't like that I have to "Contact Sales" to be able to save my models on-prem, give me a goddamn break.
This is the typical thinking of the toolmaker. It is not useful in markets. Apple is not in the business of engineering software, their in the business of consumer hardware.
I'm just saying...between my sandy bridge to the current box, when I looked either having to search for older components vs. just building something new, it was always just easier to build something new. Of course this was when prices were "normal" vs. today....
You seem to forget the "you can't at all" part with new Apple hardware. Of course, everything has a limit on upgrades, but not being able to upgrade your RAM or at very least SSD is insane that we put up with. This is pure anti-consumer cartel outcome.
It might have more to do with legacy files than that being the best setup they could find.
They probably have tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? of 3D files at this point, organizing, reusing, composing all those parts is necessary unless they want to manufacture everything from scratch every time. Migrating all that over to a new system wont be done until it is insanely painful to use the older system.
Apple Retail ran off Windows-based Motorola MC-50s for a while in the mid-00s before moving to their own software on iPod touch and iPhone. Apple doesn't compete in the CAD space, so why not use the best tools available even if it means they run on Windows?
NX supported macos and Linux until 2019. The situation is kinda sad/ironic considering that many big CAD packages have their roots in classic UNIX workstations, and afaik that was one of the major usecases for RedHat desktop. With the general decline of MS and Windows I imagine CAD companies must be reconsidering their platform choices. But of course big ships turn slowly so who knows when anything concrete might happen
In the hardware engineering space, I don't know if I have ever seen a mac. Linux pops up a bit because of the rise of micros, but it's still 99% windows.
Why is it a cluster fuck? When it's been virtually unchanged and stable for the past 30 or so years, which is how Winamp 2.95 can run on WIndows 11 today and how Wine can so easily run Windows games. Way better than Linux and Mac have historically provided for compatibility.
I still think that it’s one of the great ironies of our time.
Linux itself bends over backwards to avoid breaking userland, to the point where there is a substantial amount of cruft when interacting directly with the kernel.
Only for GNU to say “fuck that” and create a widely mockable situation, one of the worst targets of modern programs for stability… to the point where people start using alternative libc’s specifically to statically link them.
Just a quirk of the times. GNU made the most optimal solutions of their time, but in the end we still have some tech debt. I think it was inevitable that this would happen with GNU or for that matter any project, since it's not a centralized project like linux and was never going to be since it's not just one piece of software.
Not all parts of Win32 were designed equally well. File IO, process management and most of the threading primitivs have aged really well. Thread management hasn't. The GUI parts are a sometimes hacky mess because behavioral changes created mismatches between what functions were specified to do and what that gets actually translated to. Permissions are a pain in the butt with complex ACLs, transparent file access redirects and how process elevation works.
Yes, for sure. And with hindsight a lot of things would be done differently. I’m still really impressed by most of win32 given it was designed at a time where the software and hardware landscape looked so different from what we have today. Looks complex and messy at first but I learned a ton about what makes for good design by digging into win32 and NT
Professional 3D CAD software is pretty much Windows only. Especially with a company like Apple where you have complex models with many designers working on it you aren't going to risk using anything other than the likes of NX, Catia, Creo, or SolidWorks (though I shudder at how frustrating SolidWorks would be in that use case).
I guess not for this use case. There are many industrial use cases for which there are no macOS versions. In fact, Siemens NX was once available on macOS AFAIK, but isn't anymore.
CAD is not just drawing. CAD packages are often integrated with other software that does things like stress analysis, BOM, thermal simulation, and so on.
Its an entire ecosystem that streamlines a lot of things, so it makes sense to invest in it.
The reason for Windowsis because a lot of the CAD software utilizes gfx drivers heavily for rendering. You can do things like raytracing to simulate how the product will look.
Okay that’s even more pathetic. Is it using only CPU bound software rendering? I do 3d programming on MacOS. I can assure you that it’s not slow because it’s just super-duper complex. No, it just sucks.
CAD software (and other high-end professional software) can easily cost 5-10x as much as the computer itself. You buy the computer for the software, not the other way around.
Not really most of those companies are stagnant Old-line, on the construction side Autodesk for example can barely get Autocad working on the Mac. I had to use a Dell PC laptop to run Autocad, Revit, and Navis Manage when a M1 Powerbook would blows it away on the road, at job site, and at coordination meetings away from the office as well at least Morpholio Trace, Vectorworks, and Archicad work.
It's to bad the next Powerbooks will be even more powerful and frugal unplugged from the wall at job sites and at conference rooms on the road in coordination meetings.
In Mechanical CAD the companies are even more stagnant (not willing to work on multiple platforms) ie like Blender or Blackmagic, note: there are even fewer companies out there today that in the past.
