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What's ironic is that Apple does all their mechanical CAD work for their products in Siemens NX running in Windows VMs.

leohonexus 20d ago
I understand the need for it to be in Siemens NX, but do they really run it in Windows VMs? As far as I know NX isn't certified to run in VMs without Nvidia GPU passthrough (aka Macs). It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.
- zarzavat 20d ago
  More sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.
  - bayindirh 20d ago
    Considering their backend (iCloud, etc.) runs on Linux fleets, I believe they are more pragmatic than idealists. I'd love to see a full fleet of Mac servers (XServe was a handsome piece of kit), but I believe one shall choose their battles.
    - boredatoms 20d ago
      Im curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-chips-leaked/ https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
      - SSLy 20d ago
        isn't it very stripped down iOS?
    - somat 20d ago
      So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use" The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought. Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 20d ago
        They definitely have their own servers. There was a post about that, some time ago. There’s a sibling post to yours, about them. Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.
- steve1977 20d ago
  It could be VDIs, i.e. VMs running on another system, potentially x86 with GPU
- raverbashing 20d ago
  > It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control. I don't see why. Build a VM image in the more sensible OS and work from there Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird They probably can solve every video driver issue they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac (or do the same on Linux - also possible)
  - eru 20d ago
    > Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.
  - chrisweekly 20d ago
    Yeah, a couple years ago (sorry, no citation handy) I wasn't too surprised to learn that a Windows desktop can run faster in a VM on Intel Mac hardware than directly on a similarly-priced PC.
    - gwbas1c 20d ago
      That was my experience during the Intel Mac era, when I did a lot of Windows development inside of a Mac VM. IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.
brcmthrowaway 20d ago
This is insane. Is there no great first party CAD solution on Mac?
- steve1977 20d ago
  I guess not for this use case. There are many industrial use cases for which there are no macOS versions. In fact, Siemens NX was once available on macOS AFAIK, but isn't anymore.
- left-struck 20d ago
  Nothing that CAD and engineering students would be familiar with. There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
  - culturestate 20d ago
    Not that it's necessarily suited for Apple's use case, but Autodesk's Fusion runs natively on Mac.
    - fingerlocks 20d ago
      I think it’s just an electron wrapper over a browser version. Impressively sluggish, clunky, and unresponsive for a so-called native app
      - jasode 20d ago
        Autodesk Fusion GUI uses the C++ Qt library, not Electron. Link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787
        fingerlocks 20d ago
        Okay that’s even more pathetic. Is it using only CPU bound software rendering? I do 3d programming on MacOS. I can assure you that it’s not slow because it’s just super-duper complex. No, it just sucks.
zdc1 20d ago
You would think this is a great opportunity for Apple to fill a gap in the market (and dogfood their solution too). Guess not...
- asdfsa32 20d ago
  This is the typical thinking of the toolmaker. It is not useful in markets. Apple is not in the business of engineering software, their in the business of consumer hardware.
  - pjmlp 20d ago
    Even more so, having retired themselves from server and workstation market.
    - coob 20d ago
      Are there more powerful workstations than a maxed out Mac Studio?
      - pjmlp 20d ago
        First of all, not all workstations are alike. A maxed out Mac Studio does very little for audio processing, and the custom audio cards that get used in the field. Second to do the same as many users do with graphics cards configurations, one gets into gimmicks like external eGPU adaptors. Third, Metal has not much adoption among visualisation software. Finally, a Mac Studio can only be maxed out once during its lifetime.
        caycep 19d ago
        Granted, I feel this is true re my non-Mac computers. You think you can max it out at first, but then there's new interfaces, RAM standards, etc
        asdfsa32 19d ago
chrsw 20d ago
That says more about the dire state of the industry than Apple’s own engineering preferences and their brand optics.
figbert 20d ago
All of their mechanical CAD? No- some of that is handled in Shapr (https://www.shapr3d.com/ https://www.shapr3d.com/). Given the state of the industry and the discussion in many sibling comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if this share is growing. A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app, and from my own personal experience I can tell you that I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience than any of its gargantuan antiquated peers.
- varjag 20d ago
  Shapr3d is a rather light duty stuff, it's really doubtful a company with unlimited R&D budget and megascale manufacturing would use it very much.
- traceroute66 19d ago
  > A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app.... It is no secret that Apple work closely with various well-known app developers, and in the case of Shapr they are even featured on the Apple developer site[1]. And it sounds like the collaborative efforts are paying off given your statement "I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience". :) [1] https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i6qdbzn9 https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i6qdbzn9
eddieroger 20d ago
Apple Retail ran off Windows-based Motorola MC-50s for a while in the mid-00s before moving to their own software on iPod touch and iPhone. Apple doesn't compete in the CAD space, so why not use the best tools available even if it means they run on Windows?
HPsquared 20d ago
That helps with dogfooding the VM experience, I suppose.
petsfed 20d ago
I used to work with several Apple MEs, and one EE, when they moved to the startup I was at. They were all very skilled and pragmatic engineers. While there is some tribal knowledge benefits to getting really fluent with a given CAD suite, foundationally they are just tools, so when our startup migrated from one CAD suite to another, there was pretty minimal churn. You only have to go through one project management software changeover to realize that good operators, engineers or PMs or whatever, aren't permanently affected by the particular choice of software (but they are affected by constant change in that choice). The fundamentals don't change, even if the selector switch moves from one side to the other. At the same startup, in the early days, I had a System76 laptop running their flavor of Ubuntu, and I used KiCad (but that was prior to their big UX overhaul so it was pretty painful) so I could design the few PCBs we needed. When we adopted Altium, I dual-booted the laptop. Later, I used a MacBook Pro and I ran Altium in a VM, and I've never had a more mind-bending computing experience than when I had Windows (running Altium) on one screen, OSX (with all of my firmware dev tools) on the other screen, and my keyboard shortcuts (down to cmd vs ctrl as the modifier) would change based on which screen my mouse cursor was on.
ericmcer 19d ago
It might have more to do with legacy files than that being the best setup they could find. They probably have tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? of 3D files at this point, organizing, reusing, composing all those parts is necessary unless they want to manufacture everything from scratch every time. Migrating all that over to a new system wont be done until it is insanely painful to use the older system.
Danox 19d ago
Not really most of those companies are stagnant Old-line, on the construction side Autodesk for example can barely get Autocad working on the Mac. I had to use a Dell PC laptop to run Autocad, Revit, and Navis Manage when a M1 Powerbook would blows it away on the road, at job site, and at coordination meetings away from the office as well at least Morpholio Trace, Vectorworks, and Archicad work. It's to bad the next Powerbooks will be even more powerful and frugal unplugged from the wall at job sites and at conference rooms on the road in coordination meetings. In Mechanical CAD the companies are even more stagnant (not willing to work on multiple platforms) ie like Blender or Blackmagic, note: there are even fewer companies out there today that in the past.

I understand the need for it to be in Siemens NX, but do they really run it in Windows VMs? As far as I know NX isn't certified to run in VMs without Nvidia GPU passthrough (aka Macs). It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.

zarzavat 20d ago
More sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.
- bayindirh 20d ago
  Considering their backend (iCloud, etc.) runs on Linux fleets, I believe they are more pragmatic than idealists. I'd love to see a full fleet of Mac servers (XServe was a handsome piece of kit), but I believe one shall choose their battles.
  - boredatoms 20d ago
    Im curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-chips-leaked/ https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
    - SSLy 20d ago
      isn't it very stripped down iOS?
  - somat 20d ago
    So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use" The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought. Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 20d ago
      They definitely have their own servers. There was a post about that, some time ago. There’s a sibling post to yours, about them. Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.
steve1977 20d ago
It could be VDIs, i.e. VMs running on another system, potentially x86 with GPU
raverbashing 20d ago
> It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control. I don't see why. Build a VM image in the more sensible OS and work from there Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird They probably can solve every video driver issue they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac (or do the same on Linux - also possible)
- eru 20d ago
  > Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.
- chrisweekly 20d ago
  Yeah, a couple years ago (sorry, no citation handy) I wasn't too surprised to learn that a Windows desktop can run faster in a VM on Intel Mac hardware than directly on a similarly-priced PC.
  - gwbas1c 20d ago
    That was my experience during the Intel Mac era, when I did a lot of Windows development inside of a Mac VM. IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.

brcmthrowaway 20d ago

This is insane. Is there no great first party CAD solution on Mac?

steve1977 20d ago
I guess not for this use case. There are many industrial use cases for which there are no macOS versions. In fact, Siemens NX was once available on macOS AFAIK, but isn't anymore.
left-struck 20d ago
Nothing that CAD and engineering students would be familiar with. There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
- culturestate 20d ago
  Not that it's necessarily suited for Apple's use case, but Autodesk's Fusion runs natively on Mac.
  - fingerlocks 20d ago
    I think it’s just an electron wrapper over a browser version. Impressively sluggish, clunky, and unresponsive for a so-called native app
    - jasode 20d ago
      Autodesk Fusion GUI uses the C++ Qt library, not Electron. Link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787
      - fingerlocks 20d ago
        Okay that’s even more pathetic. Is it using only CPU bound software rendering? I do 3d programming on MacOS. I can assure you that it’s not slow because it’s just super-duper complex. No, it just sucks.

zdc1 20d ago

You would think this is a great opportunity for Apple to fill a gap in the market (and dogfood their solution too). Guess not...

asdfsa32 20d ago
This is the typical thinking of the toolmaker. It is not useful in markets. Apple is not in the business of engineering software, their in the business of consumer hardware.
- pjmlp 20d ago
  Even more so, having retired themselves from server and workstation market.
  - coob 20d ago
    Are there more powerful workstations than a maxed out Mac Studio?
    - pjmlp 20d ago
      First of all, not all workstations are alike. A maxed out Mac Studio does very little for audio processing, and the custom audio cards that get used in the field. Second to do the same as many users do with graphics cards configurations, one gets into gimmicks like external eGPU adaptors. Third, Metal has not much adoption among visualisation software. Finally, a Mac Studio can only be maxed out once during its lifetime.
      - caycep 19d ago
        Granted, I feel this is true re my non-Mac computers. You think you can max it out at first, but then there's new interfaces, RAM standards, etc
        asdfsa32 19d ago

chrsw 20d ago

That says more about the dire state of the industry than Apple’s own engineering preferences and their brand optics.

figbert 20d ago

All of their mechanical CAD? No- some of that is handled in Shapr (https://www.shapr3d.com/ https://www.shapr3d.com/). Given the state of the industry and the discussion in many sibling comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if this share is growing. A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app, and from my own personal experience I can tell you that I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience than any of its gargantuan antiquated peers.

varjag 20d ago
Shapr3d is a rather light duty stuff, it's really doubtful a company with unlimited R&D budget and megascale manufacturing would use it very much.
traceroute66 19d ago
> A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app.... It is no secret that Apple work closely with various well-known app developers, and in the case of Shapr they are even featured on the Apple developer site[1]. And it sounds like the collaborative efforts are paying off given your statement "I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience". :) [1] https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i6qdbzn9 https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i6qdbzn9

eddieroger 20d ago

Apple Retail ran off Windows-based Motorola MC-50s for a while in the mid-00s before moving to their own software on iPod touch and iPhone. Apple doesn't compete in the CAD space, so why not use the best tools available even if it means they run on Windows?

HPsquared 20d ago

That helps with dogfooding the VM experience, I suppose.

petsfed 20d ago

I used to work with several Apple MEs, and one EE, when they moved to the startup I was at. They were all very skilled and pragmatic engineers. While there is some tribal knowledge benefits to getting really fluent with a given CAD suite, foundationally they are just tools, so when our startup migrated from one CAD suite to another, there was pretty minimal churn. You only have to go through one project management software changeover to realize that good operators, engineers or PMs or whatever, aren't permanently affected by the particular choice of software (but they are affected by constant change in that choice). The fundamentals don't change, even if the selector switch moves from one side to the other. At the same startup, in the early days, I had a System76 laptop running their flavor of Ubuntu, and I used KiCad (but that was prior to their big UX overhaul so it was pretty painful) so I could design the few PCBs we needed. When we adopted Altium, I dual-booted the laptop. Later, I used a MacBook Pro and I ran Altium in a VM, and I've never had a more mind-bending computing experience than when I had Windows (running Altium) on one screen, OSX (with all of my firmware dev tools) on the other screen, and my keyboard shortcuts (down to cmd vs ctrl as the modifier) would change based on which screen my mouse cursor was on.

ericmcer 19d ago

It might have more to do with legacy files than that being the best setup they could find. They probably have tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? of 3D files at this point, organizing, reusing, composing all those parts is necessary unless they want to manufacture everything from scratch every time. Migrating all that over to a new system wont be done until it is insanely painful to use the older system.

Danox 19d ago

Not really most of those companies are stagnant Old-line, on the construction side Autodesk for example can barely get Autocad working on the Mac. I had to use a Dell PC laptop to run Autocad, Revit, and Navis Manage when a M1 Powerbook would blows it away on the road, at job site, and at coordination meetings away from the office as well at least Morpholio Trace, Vectorworks, and Archicad work. It's to bad the next Powerbooks will be even more powerful and frugal unplugged from the wall at job sites and at conference rooms on the road in coordination meetings. In Mechanical CAD the companies are even more stagnant (not willing to work on multiple platforms) ie like Blender or Blackmagic, note: there are even fewer companies out there today that in the past.