What's Better for Engineers? PCs or Macs?

Great hardware and you can run both OS X (which is a Unix based OS - AKA Mac OS X) and Windows.

In fact, that is exactly what I am doing now. I have a MacBook Pro and a 30" display attached to it. The browser is running in OS X and I have a speaker design software running in Windows simultaneously. You could run Linux, too.

Cons: Expensive!

Pros: Uber cool. The hardware that runs all operating systems.

Recommendations: Unless you are well heeled, consider the cheaper PC notebooks.

Well, I'll say Autodesk, how about that?

Specifically, Inventor though, not Autocad, as I am a long time Inventor user.

And, I would also vote for a Wintel platform for the vast majority of engineering usage. I was with ComputerVision when we developed our first PC based software and haven't looked back since. Though I was a home Apple user at the time.

Hooker

I started out with AutoCAD Version 1.1 operating in a DOS environment on Intel 8086 CPU's and seperate mathcoprocessers. The program executables were on one 720K floppy, the graphic card and mouse drivers on the other!

I can still remember how excited I was at using this marvel from AutoDesk.

However, they got caught napping, drugged no doubt by their long term, enormous success. They woke up long after the 3D solids market had come alive. I was still in very close relationship with software developers and marketing types and saw how they were suffering through archaic decision making, mistakes that they have never ever really overcome.

There was no excuse for this. They had more money than God and had plenty of talent to throw at the problem. But they crippled development of what could have been an atom smasher and watched myopically as their enormous user base dwindled.,

One big blunder was the sales types insisting that the 3D solids package have the look and feel of the old 2D software and thus imposed a crushing albatross around the necks of software developers who now found themselves burdened with trying to write a whole new program on top of millions of lines of old code, some written in DOS.

One developer admitted to me that there were over 25,000 lines of source code with absolutely no documentation of any kind.

I admire your loyalty to Autodesk, or whatever they call themselves these days. I too owe a great deal to those who created that exciting environment and made it possible for me to support myself and my family for so many years.

However, they failed to notice in a timely fashion, that an entirely new paradigm had completely obsoleted drafting, an archaic technology that had been invented three thousand years earlier by the Egyptians so as to hide the corridors to the Pharaoh's burial chamber. If they have survived at all, I suspect thay can thank the architectural community who, for some strange reason, continues to design in a 2D environment.,

From 1981 to 1995 (when Windows and Solidworks arrived) is a long run for any software package. They shouldn't complain.

L. J.

What goes around comes around. Your description of Autodesk seems to be part of the CAD company life cycle.

I was with ComputerVision selling workstation based CAD/CAM when Autocad hit the street. Several years later, as sales were tanking to PC based Autocad in the 2D drafting market, CV decided we needed to market our own PC system, Micro-CADDS. I was in the CAM marketing group trying to come up with a viable product to be an adjunct to the CAD side on the PC. At the same time the workstation CAD side (primarily a surface modeling system)was fighting the Pro-Engineer parametric modeling phenomena. The management was rather blase about the competition and never figured we could possibly lose most of our installed base (largest in the world at the time) but eventually the Titanic went down and got bought up by PTC.

I had since moved on to work for an Autodesk (among other things) re-seller and focused on CAM add-ons. I sold SmartCam and eventually got into selling and supporting a machining package from a mid-west company that Autodesk bought out. That software died a slow death as Autodesk didn't have the in-house marketing expertise to understand the market, much less support it.

That was about the time Solidworks and other competitors started nipping at their heels. And they made similar mistakes to Computervision, underestimating the new upstarts with parametric solids modeling. Now, though, after using both systems, my personal opinion is that Inventor is the better of the two with Solidworks having strengths in its own right.

To stay on topic, though, whichever ports to Linux first will likely get my future business. Apple will never be a contender, IMO.

"What goes around comes around. Your description of Autodesk seems to be part of the CAD company life cycle."

I agree.

Solidworks did so well beating Solidedge in the market place that Siemens bought Solidedge for relatively little money. It remains to be seen how things might change under different management.

In it's desire to stay ahead of the competition, Solidworks is causing it's own problems. What were originally easy, intuitive menus have now become several layers deep. What is dumb, in my opinion, is burying the more frequently used commands behind other, lesser ones.

The fundamental power has always been there. If you can obtain a five year old release, you'll find that it does 95% of what the current package does.

The only downside is that if you are working across a design community involving many firms, and just one generates designs in the latest version, no one with older versions can open them.

L. J.

"Piping programs with all the schedules, matching valves and fittings, thermodynamics, wiring and harness development, boundary layer phenomenon, fastener libraries, electrical connectors. complex gear generators, linked spread sheets and BOM's.,"

can you please explain how can i download this information on my laptop.

please give me some links if you can.

whatever you requirements are i guess it all comes down to which software you like to use. on which systems it is availlable and what the performance are.

For tinkering Linux is the best, Windows (XP) is best supported and Mac is not far behind.

Unfortunately that's not entirely true. Regardless of the software you personally prefer, you must operate in a professional environment which requires flawless and painless communication of files. The ubiquity of a particular package (such as AutoCAD or the dreadful Word) must be considered when a decision point arrives. It makes life much easier, and indeed possible, when your fellow pros can be e-mailed files and read them without problem. And vice versa of course.

Office may be a horrendously bad suite of software, but arriving at a podium in front of 200 people with nothing more than a memory stick and heart tablets, and getting Powerpoint to run 1st time (in spite of Microsofts every worst intention), is a feat of technology that has been worth the pain - even if it took MS 20 years to get there!

The new ultra-thin Mac laptops are very sexy though ;-)

I would like to add just one item to your excellent answer. You may be able to expound on it better than I because I am absolutely NOT a computer geek. I just remember hard lessons for a long time. The latest, greatest graphics cards that are designed for use with games are not likely to run well with CAD systems. I am now using a card from G-Force which works quite well. With the expensive but wrong card your CAD/CAM software could behave as though it were on drugs.

All things considered...PCs and workstations.

I asked this question once, and was given this reply, "PC's build machinery, Mac's paint butterflies.

So I stuck with PC's good or bad.

pc stands for personal computer, so your asking "whats better for engineers? macs or macs?"

This is a question which you should ask your advisor at the university you intend to attend. They may have software packages which are only compatible with one platform or the other. When considering a major purchase such as this, it is wise to put aside all preconceived notions of what is "cool" or what is "in" and base your decision on cold hard fact. I had an Apple IIE years ago and upgraded to a MAC. By the time that crashed (aftermarket external hard drive not the MAC) the PC and windows had established domination in the software market... I bought the PC complaining about Microsoft and their theft of the MAC OS all the while.

Most of the software I have used, do not support the mac OS. Also the files that the MAC uses, such as word processing files, are several times larger than the windows based files.

best of lucks with the program. mechanical engineering is such a cool program to study. i still miss it after all these years.

do remember that there are many software programs that you don't have access to with your own laptop, neither are they practical to run on a laptop like autodesk or 3D-autoplant or 3D-smartplant or 3D-PDS or any other robotic simulations, etc... instead, you have to use the workstations at school to do your assignment. therefore, these software should not be the influence on how you will pick the laptop.

I bet you that you will not get a straight answer from the department of mechanical engineering. Since there are a lot of personal preference in mechanical engineering.

"neither are they practical to run on a laptop like autodesk..."

Not entirely accurate. I run Autodesk Inventor 2009 on my Toshiba 17" duo-core laptop quite nicely, and even VPN into my Autodesk Vault file repository regularly from home or on the road to work on projects. One project I just finished had over 200 discreet parts and over 5000 instances and with a full load of memory I had no problems working on it with the Toshiba.

One just has to make sure that such a laptop is configured for fairly high-end gaming and they will do fine.

And my Toshiba was not that expensive, about $1600. My partner just got a top of the line Xi laptop to replace his CAD desktop. Cost - around $5000 with all the bells and whistles to support 64 bit and included an electronic hard drive.

Hooker

To keep it short,

Mac is for artists and fashionistas,

PC is for engineers and scientists.

End Period.

I do quite a bit of cad work and I find that My most recent Dell XPS 1530 system does it without any problems. I am currently running a pentium core 2 duo @ 2.3 Ghz with a fsb speed of 800Mhz. I have 4 gig of ram and a geforce 8500 graphics card with 128 meg of video ram.

I know Dell has had its difficulties but for the price I got a lean mean laptop the does a great job of running any rogram I want. Plus i can still ad a better graphics card and boost it up from where it is now. All for the low low price of 1299.99. The same functions for a Mac(which i price shopped) was about 3 grand.

Just my input.

I have little experince with MAC's but can say Microsoft makes more money on errors in software that it seems more profitable to them to make a defective product. For example I purchased MS OFFICE 1997 that had Excel on it that worked great. But when they switched to the XP system, they disabled it because they said a defect in Excel allowed hacking in the XP system. I was to buy the newer version of Excel (400 dollars) as the solution.

Currently there is Open Office, which works just as good, and is free that can replace MS Office.

One word of warning that may or may not apply to you in your studies.

Some universities (public) have a bait and switch program, that lure students in with their engineering programs. The students are fully capable of doing good work, but because the university programs cannot handle the number of students they admitt, they have a 2 semester hour trap set. The class covers engineering software that includes spreadsheets and math packages done in group study. Sounds innocent. But here is the catch. The material is at a suitable level, but they have about 6 semester hours worth of work involved in the 2 hour class. All the group has to be able to meet at the same time to do the projects, so just finding a time suitable to all consumes time and is difficult. Like four keys being turned at the same time to launch a missle.

They do similiar things in their Computer Science programs, having on a huge campus a single lab where the software can be written and evaluated for homework, the result is lines of people waiting outside the hallway for a chance to get to a computer.

Commonly textbooks for the classes come in two weeks late at the bookstore, that is another trick they use. Its unethical from the get go. Transfer students are the most at risk.

So my advice to protect yourself is to find out what math packages they require for their homework, and buy a student's version to get aquanted with a year before starting classes. Also do some detective work, talk to students who have been there for a couple of years, to see if they can describe a course that fits that description.

At the public university I went to, 3 out of the 3 high demand programs I checked ond on campus had this kind of trap going on. It is not weeding out the unprepared, its bait and switch. They figure you will switch to another program and still stay on their campus.

The "bait and switch" is just one technique of (the rest of the story)...

First, what is (college) mostly about?...

Primarily, it's about making money, and providing job security for (administration, etc...)

How does (college) make money?

Primarily, by conducting research, and by subsequent publishing. (the top two research schools used to be UC Berkeley and Columbia, and may or may not, still be...) There can be BIG money in certain lucrative areas of research, such as medical, etc.

Therefore, what is (college) actually there to do?

First, educating, as a purpose, is only a secondarily so, and training is a tertiary one, at best. And, putting a theoretical education into actual practice is an occasional coincidence...

So, primarily, the actual purpose of (college) is to "screen" for the most promising potential future researchers, which are revealed as the proportionately few successful doctoral graduates. (The rest are effectively discarded as disposeable academic refuse, unless they happen to become successful in spite of themselves, and want to financially donate to the various alumni interests...)

At the bachelor level, graduates have been screened for potential as (helper) researchers, if they have done a senior project.

At the masters level, graduates have been screened for potential as (apprentice) researchers. They have done one research project of their own...

At the doctorate level, graduates have been screened for potential as (journeymen) researchers. They have done two research projects, unless they are a History major at Stanford who chose the NON-thesis course of study...

And at the post-doctoral level, graduates have been screened for potential as (master) researchers... They may have done three research projects.

So, the (bait and switch) is part of the (selection...) procedure to evaluate which students are the most committed to enduring the administrative (hazing...) in said screening process, and are likely to be the mostly compliant, and manipulatable, after they do complete doctoral programs. It's really a kind (survival-of-the-academically-fittest...) mechanism, rather than actual education...

Even those schools with no doctoral programs will measure their success in terms of how well their academic programs compare to those schools which do have doctoral programs... and therefore become complicit in the machination...

Oh yes, tolerance of the proper research (image) is essential even after completing successful research. (College) does not like to look like it might have dirtied their own hands in the course of conducting said research. One case in point being that one Arthur Casagrande was the leader of possibly the leading geotechnical research laboratory in the WORLD when he retired from his professorship at Harvard. Said lab was then shut down for good... (Bad "form" for any (Ivy) to study even just the structural capacities of dirt?...)

That is what (college) is REALLY all about...

MAC = Graphic Designer

PC = Engineer - The PC WIndows / Intell based systems offer more robust options for your engineering and CAD programs.

I'm a scientist/engineer, and a Mac user from year 1 (1984).

I've been designing machines on my Mac for most of that time (using MiniCad, which later became Vectorworks), and either building them myself or supervising the construction.

My current MacBook Pro is an Intel dual processor unit, with 3G of RAM. I commonly have 10 or more programs running at once, including CAD and most everything else on the Mac, plus a program or two in Windows XP (which admittedly I rarely use), with no problems.

I'm interested to notice that no one so far has mentioned viruses and other malware. The last time I had to deal with a virus on a Mac (I service Macs on the side, so hear about problems quickly) was 1998.

It sounds like our company is going to be adding Solidworks, so in the next month or two I'll find out how it runs on the Mac/Windows.

I'd be interested to know how Solidworks runs too, on bootcamp and parallel, not by dual booting on a Mactel machine. But please don't do like what I see on other CAD forums. Too often Mac addicts report that some Windows application like CAD runs just great but that's usually with one or two parts open and no assemblies or drawings. In other words, not a true production environment.

Let me know when you get to the point of doing documentation drawings where you have 200 to 300 discrete parts/subassemblies open and 3000 to 5000 instances of those parts in those aubassemblies. That's the environment I typically work in on my Wintel machines with Inventor 2009. Oh, and tell me how it handles parts list generation in the drawings and Bill Of Material generation for ERP integration.

Hooker <-- who still owns an Apple ][, serial number 1479

PS - Viruses and malware? I haven't seen those problems in years on my Wintel machines, and, yes, I'm connected to the 'net.

It depends on the software you need. There is some software that is only available on PC. On PC you have to have firewalls, Antivirus, Antispyware, and backup your data.

Good question and so far many good answers.

Many people will say the MAC is a better machine. They probably are right, but with software considerations it might be a terrible choice for your needs.

Many people will say that the MAC OS and Linux OS are more stable, more secure and better that Windows. I don't see any way that they can be wrong.

But, for most science, engineering and "normal people stuff" I suggest "if in doubt, get the Intel Architecture PC running Windows". Many software packages are Windows only. A computer is worthless unless you can use it to get something done.

Bruce states a common computer acquisition rule of thumb that goes back many, many years:

When buying computer hardware, always "buy" the software first. Do that and you'll not go wrong...

Go for the Mac. I just purchased my first Mac and it works great. Using Pages, Numbers and Keynote is a blast and it converts automatically to MicroSoft format packages (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). Also, all CAD packages are not meant to work on Macs (very disappointing). So you must partition the hard drive and install XP. The Mac is very stable and you will find much faster than any PC!

I'm very sorry you didn't see fit to identify yourself, or to register if you haven't done so!

There are some CAD programs that work on the Mac. I've used Vectorworks for many years - it runs on both platforms. Unfortunately, its greatest acceptance seems to be in the architecture arena. I do mostly machine design. My biggest limitation is not having found the time to learn how to do any but the most basic stuff in 3D. I regularly import from and export to several of the major PC-only CAD packages.

It is not necessary to partition the drive to install XP using Parallels. I'm not sure about Bootcamp or VMware...

This is facinating. Engineers asking, "Which is better, Mac or PC?"

A generation ago it was, "Which is better, HP (with Reverse Polish Notation) or TI?"

A generation before that, it was, "Which is better, Post or Pickett? (The bamboo Post being subject to warping with humidity changes, but the aluminum Pickett subject to being bent.)"

What will the corresponding question be for the NEXT generation of engineers?

Bill

A generation [?] ago it was, "Which is better, HP (with Reverse Polish Notation) or TI?"

HP or TI?? I remember it being: TI or a TI 51SR (calculator)? Or, TI or Nothing (but pencil and paper).

Probably the next generation will ask which network-based computing service is best; actually owning application software will become passe as computing moves back to the old, big-bad-blue days of lease, not own.

Or possibly:

Which neural enhancer chip is best, Gaggle or Yippee? Gaggle allows faster direct connection to the internet but Yippee has a better library of proprietary engineering applications.

i remember in my youth it was Atari ST Vs Amiga 500 (oh there was als the ZX spectrum)

PC's abilities were too weak back then