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pers0n

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 5, 2014
246
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I don't mean basic or simple/utility software like iTunes, Little Snitch, Keynote or CleanmyMac.

I mean software used by professionals like Sketch, Final Cut, ...
 
Not for nothing, but I'd put Keynote into that list anyway. I've used it a bunch building very polished decks professionally. PowerPoint has gotten better in recent years, but Keynote still runs circles around it.

Just as an example, you can copy and paste objects directly from Illustrator and they come in not as rasterized PNGs or whatever, but as full-fidelity vector graphics. That's a huge deal because not only does it mean unlimited scaling with no pixel artifacts, but it means you can later copy those graphics back out of Keynote and into Illustrator if you need. This all flies under the radar and isn't really visible to casual users, but for design professionals, it makes Keynote a really powerful companion to Illustrator.
 
You can also add Pixelmator.

Most Microsoft stuff - the only two exceptions I'm aware of are Visio and Project. Visual Studio Code is available, and Visual Studio is in preview at the moment. All are available in cloud versions however.
....Most Microsoft software is only available on macOS? o_O
 
[Please ignore - my reading comprehension leaves a bit to be desired today...]
 
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"Professionals" is such a vague term and could mean pretty much everything. We could easily list a few hundred applications here. Aside from the fact that Keynote is also used by professionals.

AutoCAD
Photoshop
Illustrator
InDesign
Lightroom
Acrobat
Sketch
Affinity Designer
Affinity Photo
Final Cut
Logic
Xcode
Xojo
Eclipse
Visual Studio
vim
emacs
zsh
ChemDraw
Schrödinger Suite
Gaussian
ORCA
PyMOL
BLAST
CrystalMaker
Mnova
Jupyter
Word
Excel
Powerpoint
Cinema4D
Maya
LightWave 3D
Unity3D
Unreal Engine
...

The list goes on and on...
Half the items on your list work on Windows as well as Mac. All Adobe and Microsoft software does, as well as a few others I see.
 
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I'd be interested to hear about the inverse of this thread: what professional software is ONLY on Windows? Seems like most of the big ones like Adobe CC and Microsoft Office are actively developed on both platforms.
 
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I'd be interested to hear about the inverse of this thread: what professional software is ONLY on Windows? Seems like most of the big ones like Adobe CC and Microsoft Office are actively developed on both platforms.
FrameMaker (yes, that's still a thing)
Schema ST4
Cosima
Sirius CMS
(and a bunch of other content management systems for editorial purposes and technical documentation)
WinCC
Zenon
pretty much anything that is primarily used in industry
 
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Aperture is long dead and Parallels is just a virtualization platform, and there's no shortage of those in Windows.

If you read the topic, the OP asked for professional software that was only available in MacOS. I suppose Parallels should be taken off the list since it’s available on ChromeOS, but no one cares about ChromeOS
 
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