Autodesk To Bring AutoCAD to Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch

It seems everyone wants an iPhone4, an iPod or Apple's latest money cow, the iPad and no one seems to bother with the Mac anymore.

For starters, the Mac has been seen as just an (expensive) accessory or a multimedia editor or a laptop with a great cam, great graphics and almost nothing else.

But with the announcement of Autodesk brining back the AutoCAD design and engineering software to Apple also marks the return of the Mac. This is big news for the Mac community, specifically architects, engineers, designers and the like who want AutoCAD on their MAC but will have to install 3rd-party softwares just to make it work.

The Mac was once a popular platform for AutoCAD but because of dwindling sales in the 1990's, Autodesk made its last Autocad version in 1992 and stopped supporting it in 1994. But with the booming sales of Apple products, how could Autodesk ignore the Mac anymore.

Says Amar Hanspal, senior vice president for platform solutions at Autodesk,“This is an endorsement from our side that design and engineering customers are taking the Macintosh seriously again.”

The Mac version of AutoCAD will cost $3,995, the same as the PC version, and will be released in October. AutoDesk will soon introduce a free mobile version of the software that will run on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. That version has more limited capabilities, Mr. Hanspal said. But with it, an engineer, for example, could bring drawings to a job site on an iPad, rather than on a big roll of paper, and make annotations on them.

The mobile version will be able to read any AutoCAD files, whether they were created on a PC or a Macintosh.

Mr. Hanspal said AutoDesk was considering making mobile versions of the design software for other tablets on the market.