Can an engineer use Apple computers?
Image by Markus Spiske from Pixabay
I have used a Macbook as my private computer for a couple of years, but it never occurred to me that I can use it as a professional workstation as a civil engineer. Not until now. My regular company tablet PC, an HP Elite X2, has easily been my worst computer experience of all time. Even though it is fully specced and upgraded, it still is borderline unusable. At least if I am not running Linux on it – then it works perfectly. But that’s another story. The issue is likely the ultra-low voltage 15 W CPU which runs at 100% pretty much all the time. Don’t be fooled by the quad-core i7 logo. It is nowhere near the performance its name indicate. Anyway, the problem is that many of my crucial engineering apps are Windows only. Now I have learned that this is not a problem at all.
Virtual Machines (VM) is a way of emulating a computer inside a host computer. I have been experimenting a lot with those things on my PCs. It is without a doubt the best and safest way to mess about with an operating system and try out new things. If anything breaks, it doesn’t matter at all, because the whole machine is virtual and can be restored with a couple of clicks. Obviously, you take a little performance hit while running them, so you are better off if you do this on a stronger host machine. But depending on the use case, this might not matter at all. A couple of months ago, I revived an end-of-life calculation program by running it in a VM that was “frozen in time” running an equally end-of-life version of Windows, safely isolated from the outside world. Wonderful! I can also highly recommend playing around with VMs if you want to learn more about networking.
On the Mac, I learned about a software called Parallels, which is a tool to run virtual machines in what so far has been the most straight forward and easy way ever for me at least. It just works and didn’t need any configuration whatsoever. It’s all there, from the first install. When I was playing around with Oracle Virtualbox on the PC, you need to be a bit more tech-savvy to get going. But Parallels is another story. In a couple of minutes, I had Windows 11 running on my old Macbook pro from 2017.
The next step was to install all my crucial engineering programs; Insul, Zorba, Cadna, Revit and Bluebeam Revu. Everything worked on the first try. Network setup to connect to the company servers was just as easy and I got it running on the first try with some help from Google. But that’s just me being a complete Apple n00b. Once you have figured out the Apple quirks, it feels rather natural I must say. But sometimes it can be hard to teach an old dog new tricks… My poor Macbook have mostly been collecting dust four years. But now I look forward to using it as my primary company laptop and see how things work out for a couple of months. Whatever happens, it will still be a more enjoyable experience than my current HP tablet. Heck, if this mac experiment turns out nicely, I will consider a Mac as my first choice when this one kicks the bucket.
I have also worked hard with cloud computing and about two weeks ago I finally got my cloud computing machine up and running. It is basically a powerful gaming machine running 24/7 on a broadband connection. And if I need to run heavy 3D models or Revit projects, I can just log into that one using hardware accelerated remote desktops with Parsec and do the heavy lifting in there. This also makes the transition to Mac 10X easier, because I always have a fallback plan. I just realized another beautiful thing, the Retina display. When working with civil engineering drawings, the high-resolution display is absolutely wonderful. To go back to a 1080p screen after using a proper display is not an option. You can zoom in and out and read the text and see the details without issue. On my main workstation I am using 4k screens, which I highly recommend any engineer to try out. How nice to bring that experience to my laptop as well.
I wish I had realized sooner that Mac is a serious option, even for a someone as deep in the Microsoft ecosystem as me.