Fusion 360 osx upgrade necessary for existing users?

[sricci.design]

Hello,
I don't think this is a direct design question but t relates to my design output efficiency. I am an existing fusion 360 user and I saw on the May update that fusion will no longer support 10.8.5. My question is, does this apply to all users existing and new ? If I choose to not ugrade my osx (because of all other problems with Yoshimite) will fusion 360 stop working on my current mac? This is problematic for me because I have an older mac an fusion runs great on it now and I would hate to see performance drop due to being forced to upgrade.

[Phil.E]

Sorry to say, but yes, this means that Fusion will not run on OSX 10.8.5 after the next update.

[sricci.design]

Can I choose to not download the update?


Sent from my iPhone

[sricci.design]

Is there a way to avoid the update or choose not to run it?

[Phil.E]

Sure, for only 2 weeks. You can work offline for 2 weeks before Fusion forces you to log in.

CORRECTION:

If you are using Offline mode, Fusion will detect and download an update and apply it the next time you start Fusion.

We really want to emphasize that updates are required, and here's why: We are improving the software at a rapid pace across multiple connected platforms (desktop, cloud storage, translation, etc.) All of these things need to update together. There is no way to have a static Fusion build - and at the same time leverage the power of the cloud.

[Anonymous]

This will be a problem for a lot of Mac users, there are reasons to stay whith 10.8.5.

Why don't you make it downward compatible?

[Helmi74]

I guess this is a general problem with software products that are partly working with functionality sitting on servers of the provider. At the end this is something Autodesk should already be working on and thinking about because i guess this will get an even bigger problem in the future.

Backwards compatibility of course is nast thing to keep and it is even more complicated in a client/server environment but at least any solution should be there to not force clients to update their Operating system to some version that may probably not work for them with other software products.

Yosemite is probably one of the best examples which caused problems with a rather broad range of other products or generally genres (audio producers probably can tell stories about that).

[Phil.E]

Here is the most recent breakdown of mac OS versions in use. This is 6 month old data, so I would assume the older versions would show less usage today.

Note: OSX 10.7 is no longer supported by Apple. In just a few months 10.8 will also be unsupported by Apple.

Article:

http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/os-x-market-share-statistics-1-in-5-macs-still-unsupported/

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the answer Phil.

That pie looked sushi to me, so I searched and wasn't convinced.

It is based on data from analytics vendor Net Applications.

Wikipedia:
Microsoft and Apple are among the company's clients.The company has also admitted that their statistics are skewed.

These admissions and the fact the company doesn't make their data sources or processing methods public, has led some to

criticize the company,questioning their impartiality and the reliability of their statistics.

"Net Applications admits to skewed statistics
In an article at “The Industry Standard”, Net Applications apparently admit that their numbers are skewed. More specifically, they admit

that they are skewed towards certain regions of the world (US-centric, anyone?). In such an amazing moment of honesty, I wonder why they

didn’t also admit to actively editing their own statistics."

My own skewed statistic says it's more up to 50% not using OSX 10.9 to 10.10 🙂

But more to the point, Apple made it possible to run OSX 10.10 on 7 year old macs.
I hope that Fusion 360 runs on at least 10.8.5 for some time until most of the problems with 10.10 are solved.

[Phil.E]

Just curious, what is your source for ~50%?

I posted the chart and the link together because, yes, it may be someone with an agenda, but without better data, it makes the point: OSX versions drop off every year. It's just a matter of time for 10.8.5.

And besides, the link is to a site that would naturally exaggerate the statistic. So if you don't trust the pie chart, it would be because the people that made it benefit from overstating the number of unsupported OSX users. If anything then, the number is less.

If we were to support 10.8.5, how long would you like us to continue supporting it?

[sricci.design]

I can only speak for myself but I had planed to buy a new MPB in another 2-3 years. 10.8.5 works great and I would hate to see such loss in fusion 360's performance just because I was forced to upgrade to an OS that is buggy and uses up so much memory. (About 1/2)

If apple released a new OS that wasn't as resource intensive and buggy I'd upgrade. I feel like many mac users with older computers have a wait and see approach.

Sent from my iPhone

[donsmac]

I'm still running osx10.8.4  on a 27in imac that's a couple years old. I did not want to upgrade to the latest version of OSX because my system works fine as is. When I check to see what others are saying about Yosemite, doesn't make me want to upgrade. To my mind an improvement to any software would be to have it work with fewer bugs, to work faster with smoother work flow. However the trend is to keep adding new features, etc, slowing down the softwares performance till you have to buy a new computer. My first computer was a 50mhz mac SE30 with only a 40 MB harddrive and 2megs of ram, however it could open Adobe Illustrator in four seconds! Now that's fast. The biggest reason I haven't upgraded to Yosemite cause they made it so **** ugly. I installed it on an external drive and then installed Fusion360. Fusion doesn't work well at all like that, slows down my connection to the internet to a crawl, from 30 MB/s to 2 MB/s, while uploading a change to the model, takes forever, checking speedtest showed my upload speed at 0.08MB/s down from the usual 1 MB/s. So I guess if I want to continue to use Fusion then I'm forced to 'upgrade' my operating system. I have a Bootcamp partition which I'm willing to sacrafice, but when I went to install Yosemite on it it says it is locked. I haven't been able to find information on how to unlock it. I can delete the partition using Disk Utility and possibly make a new partition without effecting all my data but I read you need at least OSX10.8.5 and I have 10.8.4.

I wish there was a version of Fusion360 that was not cloud based, I am just interested in making models and do not need the cloud functionality. It would be great if Fusion had an option to use the cloud or not, wouldn't that be fantastic, and I could manage my files like every other program I use, that would be super. 

[Helmi74]

Apart from the Fusion problem and the fact that your Mac maybe running well: 10.8.5 was released in October 2013. I don't know the exact support information about Mountain Lion but i think it won't receive any updates and patches for a really long time if it is still receiving any.

As long as you're connected to the internet i'd really not suggest working with old software versions just because they run smooth on your computer. That's a potential risk. Also you would probably quickly miss new features and fixes on Fusion when using an older version. I think this only looks like a good idea for a short moment.

[cekuhnen]

What is actually the issue with 10.10? I work with it and this is for the first time an Mac OS I find well through out and productive.

Specifically the next version with I am cruious about.

[Pedro_Bidarra]

A network issue in Yosemite was only recently (10.10.4) been solved:
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/26/apple-discoveryd-replaced-with-mdnsresponder/

There is an assortement of issues related to graphics performance of Yosemite, that seem to point at Video RAM getting maxed, not everybody experience those:
http://www.syntacticsugar.nl/2014/10/osx-10-10-yosemite-animation-performance/

These are the issues with Yosemite I have experienced myself, I do use it, and I'm not going back to Mavericks, I just wish Apple fixed the graphics problem.

[Pedro_Bidarra]

The stability and reliability of software nowadays is a big issue, on one side you got to keep updated because of vulnerabilities and bugs, with software like Fusion 360 you are constantly in an update loop.

On the other hand some features are rushed in and we live in a constant beta state in software.

[donsmac]

Thanks for the replies guys. So I've upgraded to Mavericks and reinstalled Fusion (on my local drive). I haven't used Fusion in over a year now and am looking forward to seeing what it's like now. I downloaded my Galleon model and for a test I added a sphere and clicked save. It's still saving after an hour of uploading. It downloaded in a reasonable amount of time though. It is a large model but it never took that much time to save before as I would save often in case of a crash. Running Speedtest shows a decrease in upload speed from 1Mb/s to 0.12Mb/s, and a decrease in download speed from 30Mb/s to 3.7Mb/s. I am pretty sure I'm being punished by the Cloud Gods for thinking the Cloud is a bad idea. Once this is uploaded I will work in offline mode to see how fast it saves to my drive. Something must be wrong. When I was running Fusion yesterday from an external drive with Yosemite on it, I thought the slow upload was due to the drive being external and connected by USB2.

Ok it just finished uploading, took 64 minutes.

I just chose to quit Fusion and got a message saying there is still 1 upload in progress even though the spinning wheel has finished. There is no indication what file they are talking about but I'm guessing it's because I deleted the sphere that I added for this test. (deleted the sphere just after hitting the save button an hour ago). We'll see in another hour if I can quit Fusion without that message.

[cekuhnen]

I am not sure if that is OS specific because failed uploads I experienced on every machine and OS. I dont know what causes it - network issues or AD's server issue.

[TrippyLighting]

I agree that featuritis is a problem, but some of the new featuer come in handy. Some of the slowness of the newer Mac OS-X versions - this is purely based on boservation - apper to have th OS opimized to run most smoothly from mac fusion drives that combine a SSD with a "normal"hadrddrive and a intelligent tiered software approach.

What I've noticed particularly starting with Maverics is that starting some programs such a Safari took much, much longer to open up with heay harddrive action. Starting VM Fusion and then Geomagic Design took several minutes with so much harddrive interaction involved that trying to work in OS-X while the VW was loading was mostly useless.

I have a mid 2010 i7iMac and recently exchanged the harddrive with a 1TB Samsung EVO 850 SSD following instruction found on the Web and things are blazing fast and snappy now. Overall cost was about $550. Obviously CPU/GPU processing heavy tasks such as 3D Rendering oo viewport performance did not improve but the machine boots faster than it ever has on any OS-X. And even the biggest programs start wihtin 1-2 seconds. Opening the VM and runnig the CAD system is more than 10 times faster than before.

Also starting Fusion 360 is very fast now.

Perhaps that may also work for you. If you want to upgrade your iMac yourself I can point you in the right direction. For me this has extended the life of this machine for at least another 2-3 years.

[cekuhnen]

@TrippyLighting Yeah after You go SSD you never go back.

I have a boot SSD which hosts also all the apps.

But then I have two other HDs which host only files and data and that in a folder that is synced / backuped (cloud external backup).

With the SSDs everything starts so much faster!