Autodesk on Mac's?

[Seth Mallory]

Our school wants to replace all of our PC's with Mac's. Does Autodesk and Inventor run as well on Mac's as on PC's. Also has any team had issues with Mac's.

Thank you

[Mike Marandola]

There is no Inventor for OS X. You would have to use Bootcamp, Parallels, or something similar so you can dual boot windows.

[Seth Mallory]

Is any one using Autodesk on Bootcamp and if so how well does it work compared to PC's? Does the system crash more often than when using designed-for-Mac applications? We are trying to find information help us deal with our IT department.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Seth Mallory

Is any one using Autodesk on Bootcamp and if so how well does it work compared to PC's? Does the system crash more often than when using designed-for-Mac applications? We are trying to find information help us deal with our IT department.

Disclaimer: I haven't run AutoCAD/Inventor on Bootcamp, but I run SolidWorks all the time. Bootcamp is just dual booting. Windows is allocated all the memory your computer has while running Bootcamp and everything. I wouldn't say it crashes any more or less than a non-Mac running Windows. Windows is Windows.

[cpeister]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Disclaimer: I haven't run AutoCAD/Inventor on Bootcamp, but I run SolidWorks all the time. Bootcamp is just dual booting. Windows is allocated all the memory your computer has while running Bootcamp and everything. I wouldn't say it crashes any more or less than a non-Mac running Windows. Windows is Windows.

My experience is the same. Bootcamp runs no differently than a windows install on another similarly equipped machine.

[dellagd]

I've used Inventor briefly on bootcamp and during that time it ran fine. I was at another team's shop and thats what they ran.

[geomapguy]

AutoCAD 14 runs great on Macs

[theawesome1730]

Originally Posted by Seth Mallory

Is any one using Autodesk on Bootcamp and if so how well does it work compared to PC's? Does the system crash more often than when using designed-for-Mac applications? We are trying to find information help us deal with our IT department.

Boot camp is a way to run windows natively on a Mac, it essentially works exactly like a "true" PC. You get full hardware utilization vs. VMware or Parallels which only get the resources OS X lets it have. Inventor runs well on my MacBook Pro in boot camp. It is 4 years old now and lags a little, but that's to be expected with aging hardware. If you have the ability to, convince the school to get some iMacs with a better than bottom end graphics card. The Intel Iris won't cut it for complex assemblies and what not. The nVidia 750GT is the lowest I would use personally. If you have any questions about running Inventor on a Mac or just about Macs in general feel free to PM

[Lil' Lavery]

While I don't have experience with it, Autodesk Fusion 360 has a OSX version.

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

While I don't have experience with it, Autodesk Fusion 360 has a OSX version.

It'll run, but it's slower than snails when I try to load the basic KitBot Files on my Core i5 MBP, but your results may vary.

[KeeganP]

I am the CAD modeler on my team, and I built the robot on my 2010 Mac running Windows 7 through Parallels Desktop 9. Was it fast? No. Was it fun? No. But was it faster than my equally-old pure Windows 7 Laptop with similar specs? Somehow, yes. You can easily do CAD on a Mac -- it just takes a little added patience and time compared to a brand new designed-for-CAD PC. I plan on getting a Windows computer that will be used for CAD in the future, but doing CAD on a Mac is entirely possible using either Bootcamp or Parallels.
(For those of you who are skeptical that I did not actually do CAD on a Mac, here's a render I did (on my Mac) with the robot I designed with Inventor (on my Mac): http://imgur.com/7EkGwbV)

[cadandcookies]

Haven't tried Autodesk, but we ran a CAD workshop this fall on dual-booting Macs with bootcamp using Creo, and our CAD laptops are all old school dualbooting Macs. Bootcamp is great-- just make sure you have a two-button mouse to use.

[echin]

Our school has Macs dual booting Windows 7 for running Autodesk Inventor. For single parts and assemblies containing only a few parts they are okay, but once you start working with large assemblies they become unbearably slow. Also, they run out of memory in about 5 minutes while working with our full robot CAD model, so we had to get a computer from our sponsor or bring in our own computers to get any design work done later in the season.

[theawesome1730]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

While I don't have experience with it, Autodesk Fusion 360 has a OSX version.

I've found it to be very limited and does not give all the necessary features an FRC team needs

[nowireless]

Our school uses all Macs, the ones used for PLTW classes run Windows 7 through Bootcamp. I have used Inventor on them with a medium sized assembly and it seemed to work well. But if you have an older Mac to run Inventor there is a good chance you will run out of memory fairly fast when loading in a some what complex assembly.