What? I don't think that can be right, as I'm pretty sure Mental Ray has been around a lot longer (since the late '80s) than both 3DS MAX and Windows NT have. IIRC, Softimage running on IRIX/Solaris was the first major 3D package to integrate and bundle Mental Ray.
Note that TeamCenter was also ported. TeamCenter allows multiCad assemblies, so some components may also be done in other CAD packages.
Rumor was that Apple had been designing in NX on Unix and paid for the port by committing to buy a number of Mac seats. If you Google "NX Macintosh Unigraphics" you can find a number of stories regarding it.
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?
As far rendering goes a translucent plastic would be done with sub surface scattering or translucence and the screen image could be mapped to the screens incandescence disconnected from any lighting, then a little glow to give it that self lit look.
