I worked at Autodesk from 2007 - 2011 and on Alias / Alias-related things for a good chunk of that. I was part of the team that ported Alias to MacOS. Alias d

I worked at Autodesk from 2007 - 2011 and on Alias / Alias-related things for a good chunk of that. I was part of the team that ported Alias to MacOS. Alias development started back in the late 80s and was written for (I think) SGI machines. Back then, the company was Alias (merged with Wavefront and ultimately acquired by Autodesk in 2006) and the software was called Studio. OpenGL formalized in the early 90s and Alias (the company) ported Studio to support this nascent API. That meant that Alias could run on any OS that supported OpenGL. This was a fantastic strategic decision because it allowed Studio to port to various flavours of Irix, HP Unix, Windows, Mac OS, and even Linux. The Linux build was/is internal. It was a little janky to use as a modeller 8 hours a day, but good enough for a development workflow. Porting to Mac OS occurred in 2008 (I think) and was a reasonably sized project. Alias renders all of its own UI in OpenGL, so in theory, it was as simple as "Get a GLContext, and render to that". Of course, there were other things to deal with: - Cocoa specifics like windows / events - Various filesystem differences - IPC (Alias launches a subprocess to open new files to insulate a bad .wire file from crashing the main process) - Performance issues caused by various aged code (e.g., still a few places using display lists). I don't have any specifics for why Autodesk invested in porting Studio to MacOS back then. Apple was on the upward trend in terms of design and market share. I can speculate Apple was demanding a Mac OS version of Alias for its own use since, as others pointed out, Apple is a pretty big Autodesk customer. I agree with the other points made here that the decision was likely made that the ROI of maintaining the Apple port wasn't worth it. Sure was fun to write though. :)