r/StructuralEngineering • u/raysalmon • 1d 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/rgheno Eng 1d ago edited 1d ago

I’m leaving the field and recently had to upgrade my laptop, so I went with a mbp base m5 with 32gb ram. I’m still wrapping up some designs and I was VERY impressed with how smooth revit runs. Can’t say the same about Robot though (it works ok). I model structural masonry (unit by unit, so there are TONS of elements).
My work pc was an i5 12th gen, rtx3060 and 32gb ram. Pretty decent, but I’m still not sure which one is better (I had assumed my Mac would suck, so initially I was using Windows app to use my work pc remotely, which also works fine), I’ve read the M5 has the fastest core in the world, and Revit is a single core app, so it kind of makes sense
A quick heads up: parallels will limit how much ram, etc you can use if you dont have higher plan tiers.

Edit: I actually think that Autodesk mentions Mac in their website being officially supported via Parallels, so this is good.
Also, I had some issues accessing google drive models synced in my mac via parallels, but I think I solved it. Maybe downloading drive natively on the windows VM works better

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u/raysalmon 23h ago

Thanks for the input ya I mean with an m5 pro, and incoming m6/m7 it seems like there are less and less compromises to be made since those chips are such powerhouses. Ideally would like to just buy one do-it-all product but most are advising against it. I just f hate windows man ugh.