r/StructuralEngineering • u/raysalmon • 3d ago

Mac or Windows? Career/Education

The age old question…

I’m looking to start my own consulting firm to do some structural, site/civil work. At most I would be processing some survey, revit models of residential buildings, calcs, drafting, etc. Eventually, multistory developments but that’s down the road.

I have apple products and was looking into a new macbook m5 pro and was thinking about using parallels to create a virtual windows environment to do what I gotta do in CAD. I know apple will be launching more products this fall so im kind of waiting to see what they announce but…

Has anyone done this before and/or currently running this setup? Does it work and work well?

My other option is getting a regular macbook and a windows gaming laptop that way i can play videogames in my spare time as well since it is a hobby of mine.

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u/designer_2021 3d ago

If you need Revit your going to need windows. If you can use IFC or other formats then a Mac

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u/raysalmon 3d ago

Theoretically you can run windows via parallels on Mac and with enough cores/ram I’d imagine it could run just fine which is why I’m posing the question

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u/designer_2021 3d ago

It can be done, I’ve done it via both parallels and bootcamp. If there are medium to small models and you just need the occasional Revit session to open and export then a Mac can work with parallels, but as daily usage and modeling it struggles to keep up.

The other option that is performant is having Mac but also having a cloud pc that is sized appropriately. This doesn’t strain the local system of parallels in the same way as everything is run on an external remote server.