With Apple continuing to deliver screaming-fast hardware in their G4 line of computers and the new Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings, the Macintosh would be an excellent platform for the SolidWorks 3D CAD system. By porting SolidWorks to Mac OS X, SolidWorks could truly make their flagship "The Standard in 3D Modeling Software" in eliminating its single-platform limitation. SolidWorks could quickly capture the No. 1 marketshare for Mac OS X based CAD systems. SolidWorks and Mac OS X share a common "Ease-of-Use" philosophy, without surrendering power, which would make them a perfect match.
As a user of Mac OS and/or SolidWorks on Windows I would like to make known to SolidWorks Corporation my great interest in seeing SolidWorks on Mac OS X.
Sincerely,
SolidWorks’ whole UI is written for Windows. They’d probably have to re-code the entire interface from scratch. That’s a project that will likely take a long time to implement, and require substantial programming resources.
The bottom line is that they need to see that there’s a potential market for this, to justify the expense. For what it would cost to develop and support a new front end for the software, they can’t risk that the product will be a commercial failure.
If you really want CAD on the Mac, look toward a small-time software package, for which the economics of the situation are less dire. Who knows, maybe another company might be willing to bet their profitability on a small, uncertain market.
Also, the hardware stuff in that opening paragraph was ridiculous when the G4 was new, and is irrelevant now. (The G5 had some neat features, like the fast vector unit, but it’s pretty much gone. The G4 was really nothing special, compared to a Pentium III or M, or Athlon XP/MP.)
All it takes is a lot of RAM (right now I’m at 4GB), VMWare Fusion 2 (hurray, Unity), and a copy of Windows XP/x64 Pro (Vista as a virtual machine? Heck no, do you think I like hurting myself?)
The end result is definitely useable; I wouldn’t call it awesome (that’s what Boot Camp is for), but it’s not terrible either. The performance through the virtual machine is on par with the native performance on my laptop.
In case you were wondering, the assembly in the above screenshot is of a possible frame design I’ve been helping 228 work on; it’s similar to our 2007 frame, but with various improvements across the board.
// And I don’t want to hear any “I can tell by the pixels its a shop” nonsense. Clearly, Photoshop is not open.
