Run AutoCAD on a Mac

Posted December 17, 2008 * Comments(6)

I was one of those guys carrying around a MacBook at Autodesk University. The main reasons I took it was to blog and check email, but throughout the week I found myself wishing that Autodesk would make AutoCAD run natively on Mac OSX.

That probably won’t happen for a while, but still, as Shaan Hurley pointed out, there are ways to run AutoCAD on your Apple hardware. He said, “Apple Bootcamp runs AutoCAD much faster but there is a downside in that you have to boot to it. Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion can run AutoCAD on the OSX desktop in a window.”

I’m glad there are ways to run Autodesk products on a Mac, but in my opinion, it’s going to be a wonderful day when AutoCAD runs natively on Mac OSX. I hope that day comes soon.

6 Comments so far

  1. Simon on December 22nd, 2008

    There was a time AutoCAD ran on a Mac. And Unix. And some other platforms.There’s an old rumour about AutoCAD solely for Windows: Autodesk made a deal with Microsoft – we make our products windows-only and in return, you (MS) won’t buy us.If it’s true, you gonna have to wait some time…

  2. Hubukai on December 31st, 2008

    I agree 100%… I also run AutoCAD on a mac.  I have tried it in both boot camp and VMWare fusion and it really works well on a mac.

  3. JP on January 4th, 2009

    I actually used AutoCAD R11 and R12 on Solaris/Sparc systems and it really ran much better than on a PC. I remember reading an article about Microsoft’s appetite for purchasing smaller software companies – partly to get code already written but also to eliminate competition. There was a question of whether Microsoft was going to introduce (purchase and relabel) their own CAD software to which they declined to comment. Soon after that I read another article where Autodesk had agreed to make AutoCAD into an MS-Office compliant product complete with being able to use MS-BASIC for scripts. Then the Mac and UNIX versions were dropped in R13 and R14. It then seemed apparent that Autodesk was dragging their feet on actually implementing Office compliance indicating their reluctance in the whole affair of being pushed around by the playground bully – something Autodesk prefered to do themselves. So now R2009 uses the same space-wasting tab menu as MS-Office. The Autodesk Vault uses MS-SQL instead of industry standard SQL, doesn’t it?Just what I remember …JP – Willis, Texas

  4. Tom Hartman on January 9th, 2009

    I use AutoCAD on my MacBook Pro via Boot Camp.  Though it is a bit of a pain to have to reboot in order to run Windows, the speed differences that I’ve found vs. VW Fusion are enough to make it worth it.  I remember attending Autodesk U the year that Autodesk announced their "pact" with Microsoft.  It was a sad day for me and it wasn’t until Apple switched to Intel processors many years later that I was able to return to running AutoCAD on the Mac.  Perhaps when it is viable from a business standpoint, they will once again make a native Mac version.

  5. Kara on March 19th, 2009

    I’ve never had the change to use AutoCAD on a MacBook. I already have an HP laptop and i’m really wanting to get one of the Mac laptops. Is there anything i should know specifially before making the switch? I’m no computer geek so reply in lame terms :-)

  6. Josh Jones on March 20th, 2009

    You could install Windows on your Mac with Bootcamp, but I recommend getting VMware so you can run Windows on your Mac OS. I just bought VMware and it’s pretty neat!

    VMware is about $80 but they have discounts on it every so often. You will also need a Windows installation CD. 

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