The cloud-based platform enables designers and engineers to access Fusion 360 anytime, anywhere, whether in the office, or on the go. For those who aren’t familiar with Fusion 360, it is a cloud-based tool for 3D industrial and mechanical design, collaboration and machining–all in one package.Īccording to Kevin Schneider, director of Fusion Product Management at Autodesk, the product was developed in response to the need for better collaboration tools and a unified collaboration environment that can accessed by multiple devices and from anywhere.

Fusion 360 is touted to be the first professional-level 3D CAD and CAM tool currently available on the Mac App Store. 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.Autodesk today announces that its Fusion 360 product will be available for download and purchase worldwide on the Mac App Store. 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 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. They work well for Fusion but they're not great for everything else we need.

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.

Fusion 360 mac