AutoCAD on the Mac

Autodesk recent­ly announced they will be ship­ping Auto­CAD 2011 for the Mac (and iOS) some­time in the next cou­ple of months. I think this is great move for them. Per­haps this relys a bit much on some old stereo­types of Mac vs Win­dows users, but I see this is Autodesk’s greater push beyond their tra­di­tion­al users into the more “cre­ative” roles (the impli­ca­tion being that art­sy-fart­sy types use Macs). With their estab­lish­ment of their Media & Enter­tain­ment ver­ti­cal in 1999 and sub­se­quent acqui­si­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly that of the ani­ma­tion plat­form Maya in 2005, they have become a major play­er in visu­al cre­ative ser­vices. While Auto­CAD (or any 3D CAD plat­form for that mat­ter) isn’t a tra­di­tion­al tool of many cre­ative types, that does­n’t mean that it won’t find some inter­est­ing applications.