teaching and coaching individual customers on “their” system
knowing the pitfalls and tricks for both platforms
writing code / developing plug-ins for both systems.
Background / Old Setting
Since Apple introduced intel chips and bootcamp, for many (>10) years my setup was to dual boot into Mac Os X and Windows (10). For smaller tasks accessing bootcamp’s windows via VMWare.
Apple Silicon, Windows 11
Rhino 9 will no longer support Mac Intel. - But it looks like it will support ARM Processor architecture (System requirements Rhino 9)
(official) Windows 11 will not run on old Intel Macs (TPM 2.0 missing), (but custom installers my do it)
What
is your setup to access both platforms ?
recommendations ?
any experiences with virtual Windows 11 ARM via VMWare / Parallels running Rhino 9 hosted on a Apple Macbook Pro, Apple Silicon ?
The good news is that UI parity has gotten better with each Rhino release for Mac. With the Rhino 9 development the command line can now be customized using the CommandMode command. This will really help with cross platform teaching environments. I also teach using a new Mac in a mixed environment and v9 will make it less confusing for beginners. The Apple Silicon machines work great with v8 and v9 but I have also been testing a Samsung ARM machine running the v9 beta. This is mainly to test the new Direct3D display option and it’s working well so far. I’ll still opt for teaching on the Mac as the M5 is much faster than the Snapdragon processor for rendering in my experience. The ARM system would still work fine though and I think the D3D support will also make life easier with the variety of laptops seen in mixed classrooms.
For teaching Rhino 8, you still need to explain that the command line is different in the UI between Mac and Windows. Otherwise, I still choose the newer Macs for teaching. If I were to teach on a PC laptop, I’d get something decked out for gaming with a good Nvidia GPU for the Cuda cores when raytracing.
I don’t use virtualization systems as my experience has been that they lag in the display area. For plugin dev, I’ll use both platforms to test on along with Git desktop to keep the repo in sync.
I and other CAD-training colleagues I know use the Apple MacBook Pro with M4 processor, running Rhino 8, Autodesk Fusion, Autodesk Maya natively, and all Windows 3D software with Parallels. This works very well, particularly as you can access any file, or do macOS screenshots and recordings from being within Parallels without any extra work.