Mac Workflows

There are many reasons to choose Macs for design work. They are better designed than their competitors. A global network of stores can be a useful support option. The tight integration of hardware and software can make them easier to manage. Apple offers fewer and carefully considered choices, making purchasing more straightforward. Their products are generally more energy efficient than competitors, which is becoming more true as they transition to their own in-house silicon. Apple offers more commitment to net-zero energy policies, material recycling, and avoiding toxic and virgin material use. Apple supports the architecture industry by being a large consumer of architectural services at stores and for their corporate campus.

However, you will give up a lot of flexibility in your workflow if you use Macs. Any plugin or niche construction program will work on Windows but only a very small subset will work on the Mac. Your consultants will be on Windows, and file interchange can be problematic (fonts in Archicad, for instance). Your hardware choices are much narrower than with PCs. You cannot build your own computer. You will definitely miss out on the bleeding edge of performance, which can hinder your firm from delivering things like VR walkthroughs that competitors offer.

Avoid using Macs in school in general, since you will want to be able to try out a variety of work flows and you don’t want to be closed off from any possibility. Although they can run Windows, at this point PC hardware is good enough that the balance of reasoning has tipped away from using Macs with both macOS and Windows.

Another note, Macs will be switching away from their current processor architecture. Right now, that architecture is shared between PCs and Macs (called x86, with Intel making Apple’s chips). This similarity enables Macs to run Bootcamp, which is a system that allows Windows 10 to run on the Mac. This is being discontinued, and future Mac workflows will need to be Mac-only. In addition, the process of transition is difficult, and some key programs may take longer to make the jump than others. Most of the programs in the workflow will probably be updated, but how quickly remains to be seen. Archicad will probably take until mid-2022 or possibly beyond. For now, you can use the PC + Mac workflow above and deliver pretty good sized projects.

Visualization Focused Alternatives

For CPU rendering, choose the iMac Pro with 18 cores or the Mac Pro with 16, 24, or 28 cores. For GPU rendering, choose the eGPU or the Mac Pro with 2x Vega II Duo cards. Connecting an eGPU to an iMac or MacBook Pro is the most cost effective option for rendering, but requires a GPU renderer, which are poorly supported on macOS. Twinmotion is available now, Octane is releasing soon, and Red Shift has promised support. Lumion and Enscape will not run macOS. It may be worth considering purchasing PCs with an NVIDIA GPUs for your visualization artists, even if you run Macs in the rest of the office. Look to spend as little as $3,000 on a realtime visualization focused GPU-rendering PC computer.