My hope was that the Macbook Air or Pro would work well enough to replace these computers entirely but maybe the best solution is to keep a few of these around for more demanding CAD work and use Airs for our other daily tasks, fieldwork, events/shows, and the occasional CAD model when needed. Like I said, it's a new computer and I have only installed a few 3D printing related programs. I am so disappointed and can't return the Mac now. We could have easily skipped that expense if we had 8-10 hours of battery life and just charged our laptops back at the hotel at the end of the day. I purchased a new Macbook with M1 chip today and fusion 360 is not working well at all. I know that's a pretty specific example but after 5-6 events in a year, each of which lasts about 2-3 days, it starts to add up. For example, we recently went to a show/event and had to pay $107/day for electricity at the convention center just to keep our computers charged for the day. Super heavy, bulky, terrible battery life, so we basically treat them like desktop PCs.Īs much as I'd like to think that CAD is the most important aspect of our business, there seem to be more drawbacks than advantages to these for everything else we do. 5.1K subscribers 49 It looks like Fusion 360 doesn't make effective use of the GPU at all so the similar times are down to the slightly faster CPU in the M1 Pro over the year old M1. 3D sketching still sucks, and I can't even dimension path length as a workaround for the missing belt/chain feature. I appreciate that they charge for the extensions la carte, but nowhere in those extensions are super basic features like weldments or belt/chain. They work well for Fusion but they're not great for everything else we need. The new price for Fusion 360, with all of its extensions, is US9600 (MSRP).

A few Alienware gaming laptops with i7s, 16 GB of memory, and RTX 3070 GPU. That's a good idea and kinda what we have right now.

Autodesk fusion 360 mac m1