Not sure why you are pushing some revisionist pricing history? Is it to make the subscription prices look worse?
This is happening in several areas. Same thing going on in design offices. The M1 is real neat, but there’s no future for CAD on arm macs, nor is there going to be (unless Apple buys Autodesk or Dassault & forces them to, which they won’t) so it’s the end of the road for Apple hardware. ...in design. Ouch.
The Mac is a secondary market for Autodesk, but they have a growing Mac user base for AutoCAD. Why would they not support Apple Silicon? Could be beneficial and lucrative for them to do so, especially if they’re on top of it now. Not sure why you would say there’s no future for CAD on ARM Macs. That’s pretty short sighted. I’m saying this as a long-time (over 25 years) AutoCAD user. Not only that, but Fusion 360 is hugely popular on the Mac, is officially being ported to Apple Silicon Macs, and Autodesk is actively offering support for Fusion 360 users running it via Rosetta2 on M1 Macs... I will assume that AutoCAD will make the Apple Silicon migration, although they have yet to officially announce anything. They are actively supporting Mac users running it on M1 system. A quick peek in their support forums will tell you that.
Yes... Played with it a bit. Our M1 13” MBP is not an ideal system for running Illustrator, IMO and was just done to try it. Runs fine. Actually is a bit faster than the Intel version for some thing, but overall can’t see much difference. As this thread has discussed, Illustrator is somewhat of an old dog that needs some real attention to optimize for current hardware. At this point, I don’t think there’s much going on here other than a straight up recompile for Apple Silicon.
Yeah. Illustrator seems ancient when put up against Affinity (or almost any other software for that matter(. But it's what a lot of still have to use for various reasons. I was hoping they would take this Apple Silicon opportunity to rewrite the code base, but it sounds like they are just recompiling.
Yeahhh, I may have sniffed too much of the glue on the glossy Autodesk/Dassault brochures, because since we ditched AutoCAD & static modeling for parametric solid modelers in 2004, I‘ve since somewhat bought into the hype that AutoCAD only exists to service archived legacy projects & otherwise has no future. With PLM, FEA, Simulation, Machining, etc... it’s easy to write acad off into the sunset. Industry voices spent a decade trying to get get A & D to port Inventor, SW, and Catia from Win to OS X, and that was the easy era when both were running on Intel, but after Adesk lost the $ they did just doing Acad, both A & D explained it would take years to recoup such costs, & there would be no further gigantic rewrites for extra OS’s. Adesk didn’t even bother doing their flagship Inventor, they just gave everyone Fusion/360 instead, which is just a big broswer-based dumbterminal, avoiding the platform problem altogether. Perhaps the situation will improve somehow, but considering the stubbornness of both co’s, I don’t see how. But all that ignores that probably a majority of at least Architecture firms can still run perfectly functional projects on Acad without the costs associated with Revit. ...I mean I still know of small firm Architects who calculate they were better off with an experienced table drafter, if they could find one under 70.
The Affinity team is in pretty good touch with its users. A lot of them told the team their need for a dimensioning tool. I have seen the team to give in for such demands. The Designers guides already are halve way there anyway
Apparently it is, for the time being, a closed beta.
