What's ironic is that Apple does all their mechanical CAD work for their products in Siemens NX running in Windows VMs.
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'd love to see a full fleet of Mac servers (XServe was a handsome piece of kit), but I believe one shall choose their battles.
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.
Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.
I don't see why. Build a VM image in the more sensible OS and work from there
Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird
They probably can solve every video driver issue they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac
(or do the same on Linux - also possible)
You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.
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.
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.
A maxed out Mac Studio does very little for audio processing, and the custom audio cards that get used in the field.
Second to do the same as many users do with graphics cards configurations, one gets into gimmicks like external eGPU adaptors.
Third, Metal has not much adoption among visualisation software.
Finally, a Mac Studio can only be maxed out once during its lifetime.
That’s what happened with Logic Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Pro#Logic) and (sort-of) Final Cut Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Pro#Creation)
I suspect they’d need a portfolio of applications in the CAD space to make that work, though.
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.
MacOS versions are more commonly found in the low end of the market, e.g. Fusion 360.
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.
What a monumental failure.
There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
Very hard for Apple, or Linux to do much about that - especially when Nvidia considered it's drivers key IP.
Couple that with a relatively small market - and it's hard to justify supporting multiple platforms.
I for one would love to see Autodesk add more Mac and Linux support across their lineup. Especially Inventor and its associated add-ons.
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.
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.