However, this situation reminds me of two other situations. The first is AutoCAD for Mac. A decade in the afterglow of the iPhone and iPod there was large interest in AutoCAD on Mac by AutoCAD users on Windows. They decided to port it anyway. And as we’ve been noting in our many AutoCAD for Mac stories, what Autodesk found was there were new types of groups of users who adopted AutoCAD for Mac (eg: corporate design and facility departments for Fortune 500 class customers. Think Gap, Inc.). Similarly, some companies who think there is little to be gained by developing a hit application on Mac have been surprised, as was SketchUp originally. They went ahead with that on little data (that story too has been told to Architosh first in detail).

Autodesk Revit is likely going to the cloud and will be a full cloud application. And while Autodesk has been clear it is unlikely to push Revit to Mac (because it’s a giant rewrite) bear in mind that a giant rewrite is exactly what will happen if they push a full version to the cloud. One other final point. All of us really don’t know how much further Intel will stumble. They have missed target deadline after target deadline for several years now. TSMC has the world’s leading chip manufacturing process technology. Intel is years—maybe 3/4 decade—behind TSMC so with that massive thermal envelop in the Mac Pro, Apple could pack in a very big dual set of Apple SoCs and deliver twice the transistor count of Intel’s largest most powerful Xeon. What Revit user would want to work on a PC then?

However, this situation reminds me of two other situations. The first is AutoCAD for Mac. A decade in the afterglow of the iPhone and iPod there was large interest in AutoCAD on Mac by AutoCAD users on Windows. They decided to port it anyway. And as we’ve been noting in our many AutoCAD for Mac stories, what Autodesk found was there were new types of groups of users who adopted AutoCAD for Mac (eg: corporate design and facility departments for Fortune 500 class customers. Think Gap, Inc.). Similarly, some companies who think there is little to be gained by developing a hit application on Mac have been surprised, as was SketchUp originally. They went ahead with that on little data (that story too has been told to Architosh first in detail).

Autodesk Revit is likely going to the cloud and will be a full cloud application. And while Autodesk has been clear it is unlikely to push Revit to Mac (because it’s a giant rewrite) bear in mind that a giant rewrite is exactly what will happen if they push a full version to the cloud. One other final point. All of us really don’t know how much further Intel will stumble. They have missed target deadline after target deadline for several years now. TSMC has the world’s leading chip manufacturing process technology. Intel is years—maybe 3/4 decade—behind TSMC so with that massive thermal envelop in the Mac Pro, Apple could pack in a very big dual set of Apple SoCs and deliver twice the transistor count of Intel’s largest most powerful Xeon. What Revit user would want to work on a PC then?