<snip>BTW, the maintenance is killing me...
I feel your pain. I used to support 25 engineers using Solidworks and cringed every time a patch or release came out. The annual maintenance charges were eye popping also.
So, just to get a little more clarification on this topic because frankly this has been a question in my mind also. When Apple wants to design a graphics image with that backlit, translucent plastic look to it whether for a button, a bar, or a logo, they would use something like Pro/Engineer or Maya and then use something like Renderman to generate the end result? Anyone have any idea what the material properties would be of the plastic and the light used to make an image?