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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

KiCad is pretty good these days, and I hear OrCad is used by Apple and is inexpensive.

OrCAD's UI is amazingly backward by modern UI standards. Prepare to be stymied by the fact that none of your muscle memory from literally any application, ever, applies to any tool within its workflow.

Fully true. I use Altium Designer day-to-day and the one time I tried to get something done in OrCAD it was completely baffling.

OTOH, OrCad works and Apple makes billions. :shrugs:

Yes, OrCAD is used by Apple from the style of iDevice schematics floating around on the interwebs.

A contractor told me he can get OrCad for a few hundred dollars per year but I never see the actual price being listed on its web site. It looks like those "if you need to ask the price you cannot afford it" software. My gut tells me it is one of these, seeing it is from one of the big EDAs.

And OrCad looks atrocious on the HiDPI screen the contractor is using... UI scaling is all screwed up.

$2400/year looks like.

If you buy at the right time when they have a sale, you can get the basic version for about $500, if I remember correctly.

I used OrCad in industrial embedded products in the late 90's. I'm surprised it's still going.

I used OrCad at university in the 80s. The UI was unintuitive even back then, when there were very few other GUI applications to compare it with. I guess the people who used it a lot back then got used to the UI and developed muscle memory for it. One of my classmates works at Apple, and it is certainly the case for him.

Candence bought OrCad and killed off the PCB editor and rebranded their utterly shitty one. The UI is horrid and barely usable without paying thousands for training. Worse support and training is all through EMA Design Automation who are the grosses parasites in the industry.

The issue is that despite usability of Cadence being so much more confusing than Altium, you'll find that at some point when a design gets big/complex enough, Altium won't be able to handle it. This means that you've got companies who have to then move up from Altium to Cadence or Mentor to manage that complexity. If anyone is going to get into PCB design today (and it's an excellent field to get into, many people retiring and you can get a good job with just an AS degree) I would still recommend learning Altium before the other guys due to its popularity. I'm surprised to hear your thoughts about EMA though - I did a few webinars for them a couple of years ago and thought they had a great push to support customers. Perhaps I just didn't have the same perspective as the customers though.

The one thing that most surprises me about Altium is that they've yet to get into meaningful simulation territory (post-layout PCB extraction). This is the biggest feature holding them back from competing with the enterprise tools in my opinion. I was hoping for some continued collaboration with Simberian after the impedance calculator came out but have yet to see anything further.

I agree that Altium is the best for starting professionally. The very biggest and most complicated designs tend to move to Mentor because even Cadence eventually chokes. Simberean would be the one to develop a plugin, but they already have a standalone gui.

Cadence just follows the old school sales contact model.

OrCad itself is relatively inexpensive, I believe the initial license is in the $2k/seat ballpark and the yearly maintenance support renewal is $500/seat.

Am I wrong in saying that the license is perpetual even if you don’t pay for support?

ie if I stop paying it won’t lock up and stop me opening my projects.

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