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After an 18-year absence, AutoCAD is finally coming back to Mac OS X. Autodesk, the company that makes the CAD program that has become he defacto industry standard, last released a native Mac version of its flagship product in 1992, writes Christina Warren on Mashable.
Not only is AutoCAD coming back to Mac OS X, Autodesk is also bringing an AutoCAD app to the iPad and iPhone. This app will let professionals import, modify and export CAD files on the go.
Autodesk has already had success on the iPhone and iPad with its Sketchbook Mobile and Sketchbook Pro apps, but these are consumer-facing tools. Still, it’s clear that this success and the growing rate of Macintosh computers in the enterprise and corporate environment have made Apple professional users a demographic worth targeting.
Although AutoCAD hasn’t been officially available for the Mac since 1992, Autodesk has supported virtualized or BootCamp installations since Apple first switched to Intel processors in 2006.
In fact, many engineers and architects in our acquaintance were finally able to convince their bosses to let them adopt the Mac as the primary workstation once it became feasible to run AutoCAD.
Since that switch to Intel, Mac marketshare has exploded. Just last week, Needham’s Charlie Wolf asserted that in the second quarter, business shipments for the Mac grew 50%, more than three times the market average of 15.7%. Mac shipments in government also grew 200% in the second quarter, sixteen times the market growth of 12.1%.
Apple may still make up a negligible share of the worldwide PC market (around 4%), but the size of the market and the type of market where Mac has a large presence has simply become too large for software companies to ignore.
Historically, there have been a handful of business applications unavailable for Mac OS X that were oft-cited reasons the Mac wasn’t ready for business. Chief among these apps were AutoCAD, Quicken/QuickBooks and Microsoft Outlook. Well, QuickBooks and Quicken have returned to Mac; Microsoft is finally bringing a proper version of Outlook to Mac OS X later this fall; and now, the grand poobah, AutoCAD, is also making its return.
As more and more enterprise software shifts to the cloud or SaaS models, the gap between Windows and Mac tools for the corporate world will likely continue to dwindle.