Yea, I’m aware how recording studios work. Those of us making amateur recordings at home don’t always have the luxury.

I'm really curious what is holding CAD companies back to port their software to the Mac?

This is a great question that people were asking even 15-20 years ago, likely even before then too, but it was before my time in asking it.

Essentially, the demand for CAD on Mac just isn't high enough to justify it, especially when anybody serious about CAD wants the absolute cutting edge of hardware, and the ability to expand upon it as soon as the rest of the industry is able to take advantage of the latest GPU. Being competitive is everything.

It's never been a case of software needing to be ported. Some CAD apps have come and gone on Mac, but the demand just isn't there in terms of sales to make it worthwhile. That's not to say that there aren't CAD apps on Macs, there are, but the big boy industrial toys are elsewhere.

Keep in mind we used to run Parallels and Bootcamp in the '00s to get Windows software on Macs!

Plus the dominant platform (Soludworks) is totally built using MS UI libraries… ribbon, etc.

I thougt autocad was ported to M1?

No one uses autocad anymore. It's as relevant to the modern CAD world as MS Basic is to us. Even the architects have moved on to stuff like Revit.

(Like, to further clarify, when I did my Engineering Technology degree, we were trained on AutoCAD (But also 3D Cad), and it was obvious then that autocad was antiquated and was soon to be abandoned en masse.

This was in 2004.

I'd assume their rendering enigne is written for single API, such as OpenGL or Vulkan. Porting it to metal would be quite large project.

Isn't there a reasonable OpenGL shim on top of Vulkan?

Cad programs barely work on the systems they’re designed for. I love solidworks, but it’s a real turd if you aren’t using one of the correct “certified” driver for your graphics card.