Siemens NX used to be available on macOS, up until about 5-6 years ago. However, Siemens found few customers were adopting it, so they discontinued it.
If Apple really cared about it, I'm sure they could have worked out some deal with Siemens to keep the macOS edition viable, even improve its UI to be native and more usable. It would require them to move away from viewing themselves just as a customer, into more seeing it as an investment into their own platform (making it viable for more use cases.) Sad to say, Apple doesn't seem to think like that much (or maybe some people there do, but not the people whose opinions really count)
Why Is it that the Mac Pro has so little Pro software available for it? Could it be the neglect? AV software used to be Apple's tentpole for Pro's, until they decided Prosumers were more profitable and lost mindshare of actual Pro's as a result (see the great migration after the releasee of the first Final Cut Pro X)
For CAD specifically I'd say "high end" are CATIA, NX and maybe Creo? SolidWorks and SolidEdge would form the tier below that.
For CAx in general it's difficult to say, because there's such a huge variety of software and every little niche has its own highly specialized (and usually very expensive) tools. I've never seen any of these support anything other than Windows and/or Linux. Some of them have Win32 GUIs and Linux is headless only (for running simulations), some are fully cross platform, some are Linux-only.
Most CAE engineers around here work on Linux, mainly because they prefer how easy it is to script and automate things and because the headless HPC/batch environment is of course also Linux. Meanwhile CAD and design only happens on Windows because CATIA is Windows only, like the various Autodesk tools used for CAID. From the late 80s to the early 2000s this place had a ton of UNIX workstations (SGI, HP, Sun) and even UNIX clusters (IRIX and SUPER-UX among others, the latter having virtually no representation on the internet today). There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.
> There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.
Are you saying some people still use IBM mainframes for CAD/CAE/etc applications? If yes, that's unexpected yet intriguing information, and I'd love to know more.
Although maybe you were just stating the obvious that IBM mainframes survive in general even if no longer in this particular domain.
Thanks for your answer! What makes it so that AutoCAD is not high end? Like what features does it lack or what workflows does it not support?
Suppose something like CATIA was available on Mac and offered lets say a performance benefit. Would you consider Mac? Or would you for example still need a whole other set of tools to be available as well for it to be even possible?
I have seen some posts on the Intel FPGA community forum about using Quartus Prime Pro (FPGA design software) on Apple Silicon. Apparently, it works, even though not officially supported.
I haven't had the time or the desire to take it for a spin yet, but I'd love to be able to compile FPGA designs on a nicely configured and quiet M2 system.
