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> It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.

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)

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> Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird

You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.

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.

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