I work with CAD on the daily, be it Solid Edge, SolidWorks, Inventor, AutoCAD. Honestly I'd personally steer you away from a Mac.
You're likely to overpay for a machine that won't perform any better (and more likely worse) than a Windows Machine.
Also, I find the bootcamp experience somewhat lacking. That feature almost seems added as an afterthought simply because Apple switched to Intel. Drivers are often old and buggy, and a lot of issues in CAD software can be traced back to poor hardware drivers.
And honestly, I hate doing CAD on a small screen, 15" is barely cutting it, no matter the resolution.
Unless portability is extremely important to you, I'd consider a 17" + machine from another vendor with a Quadro graphics card and upgrade-able RAM.
Personally, i disagree.
The Macbook Pros under bootcamp work exellent with Autodesk packages, and the advantage is that you have a very fast ssd which will really benefit these packages, and a perfect Autocad friendly qHD resolution. Almost every windows laptop will have either full hd which i find somewhat restricting, or 4k resolution which leaves icons just too small to work with, and scaling up to 150% or whatever is a joke and problematic.
You can save money buying a windows computer if its a cheap laptop. You can spend a lot more if u buy a workstation laptop, but these arent as good in my opinion, and i have used a few.
Whatever you buy, ensure it has a decent panel, my preference being strongly qhd. Ensure it has plenty of ram, i recommmend 16gb. Ensure it has a really fast ssd as this will really make a difference day to day. Ensure it has external AMD or Nvidia graphics with 2gb ddr5 vram, this makes a difference with larger software and file sizes. For regular autocad simple intel inbuilt graphics is more than fast enough.
I strongly recommend quad core processor.
Note that Autocad is a single threaded app so u could use dual core and not notice a difference in performance directly, but indirectly there are benfits to quad core over dual. But if u travel a lot or take laptop home with you every day on public transport, a smaller dual core may be better.
Also note that Autocad and Revit have switched to direct x gaming cards now and the 500euro extra for quaddro or Amd versions which have NO benefit to these packages makes no sense, but if u use solidworks or software that does use the professional cards then windows laptop with these built in adaptors are the way to go. But will cost a lot though, about the same as an Apple MBP.
It depends on your applications as much as anything.
But if your heart is set on a macbook pro, just get it it. You wont regret it.
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Personally, i disagree.
The Macbook Pros under bootcamp work exellent with Autodesk packages, and the advantage is that you have a very fast ssd which will really benefit these packages, and a perfect Autocad friendly qHD resolution. Almost every windows laptop will have either full hd which i find somewhat restricting, or 4k resolution which leaves icons just too small to work with, and scaling up to 150% or whatever is a joke and problematic.
You can save money buying a windows computer if its a cheap laptop. You can spend a lot more if u buy a workstation laptop, but these arent as good in my opinion, and i have used a few.
Whatever you buy, ensure it has a decent panel, my preference being strongly qhd. Ensure it has plenty of ram, i recommmend 16gb. Ensure it has a really fast ssd as this will really make a difference day to day. Ensure it has external AMD or Nvidia graphics with 2gb ddr5 vram, this makes a difference with larger software and file sizes. For regular autocad simple intel inbuilt graphics is more than fast enough.
I strongly recommend quad core processor.
Note that Autocad is a single threaded app so u could use dual core and not notice a difference in performance directly, but indirectly there are benfits to quad core over dual. But if u travel a lot or take laptop home with you every day on public transport, a smaller dual core may be better.
Also note that Autocad and Revit have switched to direct x gaming cards now and the 500euro extra for quaddro or Amd versions which have NO benefit to these packages makes no sense, but if u use solidworks or software that does use the professional cards then windows laptop with these built in adaptors are the way to go. But will cost a lot though, about the same as an Apple MBP.
It depends on your applications as much as anything.
But if your heart is set on a macbook pro, just get it it. You wont regret it.
Sorry for the long post. But last thing to add, on my laptop i have bootcamp set up with windows as my work laptop, and mac os as my personal laptop.
