Apple Silicon & Windows ARM

[greenm01]

Are there any plans to offer Alibre on the Windows ARM platform? Better yet, how about macOS?

Apple is making a major switch from x86 to their own ARM based M1 processors. As it stands today, one can run Windows ARM under Parallels. Unfortunately, this excludes x86 programs not compiled for Windows ARM.

I would like to use Alibre on my new Apple hardware.

 

[simonb65]

Apple's pursuit of their own eco system strikes again! Now why doesn't that surprise me!

As a developer, I can say that trying to write applications for diverging technologies costs quite a bit of development effort, and that's just on new projects that have a blank sheet of paper. Developing and diversifying old core applications based onto new platform specific cores is almost a non-starter. That's why I don't develop for MAC anymore, the market is too small and the platform changes so often ... third party developers either just can't keep up or they are charged too much to be part of the Apple developer community. That's the simple reason why Windows and Linux are the main development platforms for most productivity applications.

I'm sure Alibre has many reasons why offering AD on other platforms is not a viable proposition any time soon.

 

[JST]

Take your choice:
Improvements to Alibre,

OR

Take off a year or more from all but essential fixes to port over to Linux (the only other viable platform). And accept a slowdown in development as well as increased maintenance fees due to the extra work to port every new version over.

There are Windows environments for Linux, which work for most S/W that does not use "tricks". That seems the best approach for the moment.

 

[greenm01]

ARM is the future of mobile computing. Adapt or get left in the dust.

 

[simonb65]

ARM is the future of mobile computing. Adapt or get left in the dust.

ARM has been around for decades and has always been the core of mobile computing (as far as tablets, phones and embedded devices are concerened) because of its low power and cost, not because of its processing power. The ARM core is quite slow by modern Intel and AMD standards. Android (a cutdown branch of Linux) was created specifically for mobile ARM devices. The ARM 'core' and ARM peripherals are built (by design) for modularity, so it can be licenced and integrated into custom SoC (system on chip) designs, which is what Apple has done in tyeir new procesor, its not an archecture optimised for performance ... whichever way Apple choose to glam it up!

 

[bigseb]

I'm sure Alibre has many reasons why offering AD on other platforms is not a viable proposition any time soon.

I'm sure they'll be the same as why other CAD developers are sticking to windows. User base. I mean, how much pro-level CADCAM is available for Linux and Mac? (rhetorical question)

 

[simonb65]

I mean, how much pro-level CADCAM is available for Linux and Mac?

Same thing for high quality music digital studio software ... it's all Mac and very little Windows. Some platforms are historically better and have way higher user count for some applications than others, so logically they tend to attract the development effort onto where the biggest share of the market is.

 

[bigseb]

Same thing for high quality music digital studio software ... it's all Mac and very little Windows. Some platforms are historically better and have way higher user count for some applications than others, so logically they tend to attract the development effort onto where the biggest share of the market is.

Not quite. Most run on both. The only one I can think of that runs only on Mac is Pro Tools.

 

[simonb65]

Logic Studio! The one I originally bought for PC then Apple bought out eMagic and promptly (3 months later) dropped PC version and removed the PC licensing server. Had to go and buy an iMAC to carry on using it! Expensive year that was! ... anyway, sorry, gone off topic!

 

[Hunter]

Even if Alibre was ported to either, I would still be stuck on Win because ALL my other software runs on Win only.

Web is the answer (like Onshape)

 

[oilman]

Even if Alibre was ported to either, I would still be stuck on Win because ALL my other software runs on Win only.

Web is the answer (like Onshape)

I know of an engineering firm with 16 full-time engineers that used one of the popular web-based CAD systems. I won't name any names, but this particular cloud CAD system rolled out an update that effectively prevented their team from working for a week and a half. The firm switched to a locally installed CAD system shortly after.

I'll never personally use a cloud-only CAD system. Between incidents like this and my fear of data security... it's worth it to me to pay the extra $$$ upfront to simply buy a seat.

Regarding Mac usage... I'd also be stuck on Windows as all my other engineering applications only support Windows.

 

[simonb65]

I know of an engineering firm with 16 full-time engineers that used one of the popular web-based CAD systems. I won't name any names, but this particular cloud CAD system rolled out an update that effectively prevented their team from working for a week and a half. The firm switched to a locally installed CAD system shortly after.

I'll never personally use a cloud-only CAD system. Between incidents like this and my fear of data security... it's worth it to me to pay the extra $$$ upfront to simply buy a seat.

Its bad enough when phone apps update and break something and you can't roll back ... One reason why I would never use cloud based applications for business. As you point out there is the security/accessibility issues with data too and with performance based applications, you can't get better than a locally installed highly optimised based application.

 

[Ydl]

Even if Alibre was ported to either, I would still be stuck on Win because ALL my other software runs on Win only.

Web is the answer (like Onshape)

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but please, for the love of God, no.

Linux support though? I'd dig it.

 

[Hunter]

Forget about Linux, it just doesn't make commercial sense.

 

[JST]

Forget about Linux, it just doesn't make commercial sense.

YET