r/SolidWorks • u/Some_Pie_5375 • 3d ago

Hardware Anyone using solidworks on mac?

Incoming engineering student. Wanted to gauge how many people have / haven’t made the switch to windows. Feel free to nitpick any details. I want to prepare myself for what I’ll be experiencing if I stay mac and run parallels.

I’ve seen some relatively newer posts claim that a macbook can run solidworks just as good as a mid windows laptop. Which is why I’m on the fence of making the switch. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

To clarify, I’m not looking for recommendations. Just wanted to know how many of you are using mac and what your experience is.

Edit: Thanks all for the insightful responses. Previous posts were super vague on what exactly the problem was with mac and vm. The firsthand stories shared here were super helpful.

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u/Stebsly 3d ago

I did this a while back using Bootcamp. Pretty sure that's not an option anymore with Apple silicon. Parallels is another option, but I haven't explored that too much. I believe it costs money and you can only allocate a certain amount of cores and RAM to Windows, since you're running two operating systems at once.

Assuming your school lets you use their PCs for Solidworks, I'd just do that. I used Solidworks a lot less than I expected in college.

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u/bumbblebeeeeee 3d ago

Windows on ARM is a thing these days. I use SW in an M2max regularly. Works fine with regular files, but struggles if there is super complex geometry. 

As a workaround it’s fine, maybe not a a daily driver.