Then, you just download Inventor like you normally would, open up the download file inside of the Parallels Windows file explorer, execute, and you’re good to go. I was pleasantly surprised.ĭownloading Parallels is as simple as clicking a few buttons and you’re reading to go. When I first investigated running a program as powerful as Autodesk Inventor on something seemingly so “unofficial” as a 3rd party app to run Windows, I didn’t really think it would be possible. That’s to say, Parallels doesn’t have any competition, but the price is fairly reasonable for business software. The biggest downside to Parallels is that it isn’t free, but for only about $80 per year, it’s priced pretty competitively. This ultimately means that you can have a Windows desktop booted as an app while still logged in regularly on a Mac. It essentially runs a “fake” operating system as a program inside of MacOS. If you own a Mac, then you might be a little familiar with what Parallels does. The far more preferrable solution, at least for me, is to run a program called Parallels.

The biggest downside is what I mentioned before – you’re stuck with your hard drive partitioned and each time you want to load another OS, you have to restart your computer. The largest benefit of partitioning your hard drives is that it boots the computer fully in each operating system, and it’s free. However, this is permanent and based on how much memory you have in your Mac model, you can easily run out of space for a certain partition ( Mac/Windows). The tried and tested way of running windows on a Macbook is by partitioning your hard drive and isntalling windows on a certain portion of your computer. However, making that happen is actually fairly simple. If you haven’t caught on through my careful phrasing, running Inventor on a Mac does require that you run Windows on your computer in some form or fashion, there’s no getting around that. Let’s take a look at what you’ll need to do to get Inventor installed on your MacOS computer. Frankly, after getting Inventor installed on my Mac and running it, there’s nothing I’m missing out on compared to having a Windows-based PC, other than maybe a few extra dollars in my pocket thanks to Apple’s enjoyable pricing structure… but I digress. That said, I’ve run into countless problems trying to get my engineering software to run seamlessly on Macs over the years, so I wanted to share a simple process you can go through to get any Windows-based software to run on a Mac with ease.

If you’re an engineer who happens to own a Mac (I know, there are probably a total of 3 of us), then you might be surprised to learn just how simple it is to run Autodesk Inventor on a Macbook or other similar primarily MacOS-based device.īeing an engineer myself who has more of a hankering for the visual design space, Macbooks have always been my preferred cup of personal computer tea.

Autodesk inventor for mac free