I have taken the liberty to share with you some thoughts about a serious gap in Apples Mac offering.
It is the lacking presence in all things CAD (mechanical, electronic, simulations).
Although the early days of the Mac platform saw a few vendors entering this space, it can be said that from the 90s on Apple has given up this battle altogether.
There are several strategic reasons why would Apple step in to mend this gap:
- CAD users tend to splurge on computing power, and there are tens of millions of them in the world. This is a large high end segment who would benefit of, and willing to pay for high-end Macs.
- CAD software usually push computing platforms to their limits, with needs for large memory space, large and complex file directories, high requirements for interconnectivity, need for file-vaults and permission driven accessibility, work splitting and work sharing. While the Windows platform enables such solutions - by being open for 3rd party developers - Many of these capabilities already exist on the UNIX backbone of Mac OSX.
- While the Mac dominates several domains in the publishing world, as well as increasing gains in web developers and programmers, the mechanical, electronic departments are populated by windows machines. This cant be said on the Windows platform: You will find a mainstream solution in each and every domain. As a result, corporations tend to buy more PCs, doing without Macs even when they could benefit from it.
- Interdisciplinaries, such as industrial designers, do benefit from a single platform, where they can run 3D, 2D, engineering and design applications. They can find these today only on the Windows platform.
In my view, both Apple and the user community would benefit from bold moves in the CAD arena, Apple by bolstering its offering in this domain - together with prominent business partners, and the users, by getting access to a better computing experience in their professional domain, all this by willingly paying the premium Apple commands for its products.
It is the lacking presence in all things CAD (mechanical, electronic, simulations).
Although the early days of the Mac platform saw a few vendors entering this space, it can be said that from the 90s on Apple has given up this battle altogether.
There are several strategic reasons why would Apple step in to mend this gap:
- CAD users tend to splurge on computing power, and there are tens of millions of them in the world. This is a large high end segment who would benefit of, and willing to pay for high-end Macs.
- CAD software usually push computing platforms to their limits, with needs for large memory space, large and complex file directories, high requirements for interconnectivity, need for file-vaults and permission driven accessibility, work splitting and work sharing. While the Windows platform enables such solutions - by being open for 3rd party developers - Many of these capabilities already exist on the UNIX backbone of Mac OSX.
- While the Mac dominates several domains in the publishing world, as well as increasing gains in web developers and programmers, the mechanical, electronic departments are populated by windows machines. This cant be said on the Windows platform: You will find a mainstream solution in each and every domain. As a result, corporations tend to buy more PCs, doing without Macs even when they could benefit from it.
- Interdisciplinaries, such as industrial designers, do benefit from a single platform, where they can run 3D, 2D, engineering and design applications. They can find these today only on the Windows platform.
In my view, both Apple and the user community would benefit from bold moves in the CAD arena, Apple by bolstering its offering in this domain - together with prominent business partners, and the users, by getting access to a better computing experience in their professional domain, all this by willingly paying the premium Apple commands for its products.
I'll have to dig around a bit, but I think v. 2.6 (maybe it was 2.63) was available in a Windows edition, primarily to taking advantage of (Win. 1.0) drivers available for certain EVGA boards that could do resolutions higher than 640x480.