Request for Development of Autodesk Inventor for Apple Silicon

[nick_hirschiG2ABK]

Dear Autodesk Team,

I am a long-time user of Autodesk Inventor and greatly appreciate your software. However, with the introduction of Apple Silicon chips (M1, M2, M4, etc.), the computing landscape has fundamentally changed. More and more engineers and designers, myself included, are embracing the impressive performance and efficiency of this platform – yet without the ability to run Inventor natively.

Why Apple Silicon is important:

• Unparalleled performance and energy efficiency, ideal for CAD applications.
• A growing user base of engineers and creatives who rely on macOS.
• Autodesk has already proven with Fusion 360 that high-quality CAD software on macOS is achievable – but Inventor offers industry-oriented functionality that many users still need.

A native version of Inventor for Apple Silicon would not only enhance the experience for existing users but also open new markets and opportunities for Autodesk.

I hope you will consider this request. Thank you for taking the time to review my suggestion!

Best regards,

Nick Hirschi

[dmytty]

Great idea in concept, but Inventor is a massive legacy code base - and has larger legacy business practices.

Open source tools such as FreeCAD (built on OpenCascade) are finally gaining some traction (the FreeCAD project hit version 1.0 at the end of 2024).  FreeCAD is serviceable for simple part design, but Assemblies are still not fully baked.  Obviously Inventor has it's quirks and shortcomings, but it's still far ahead in mostly-fully-baked features, but of course it's stuck on Windows.

Cross platform tools built with the Rust language such as Bevy (3d game engine) and Truck (CAD kernel) could eventually be merged and that would truly be awesome; but that's tens of thousands of developer hours down the road.

The reality is that CAD is very complex, and parametric even more so:  things such as fillets have a massive amount of algorithm and code logic development behind them (one article mentioned 15 years of code refinement for fillets), and so they represent the real strength of closed sourced CAD (ie Inventor) and open source (FreeCAD).

Getting Autodesk to actually sell Software As A Service (ie features and new capabilities that 'just work') rather than Data Access As A Service (ie customer capture via data capture) would be the real revolution.