Is it free for faculty?!?

I think so Donna. I know it's free for Students, not sure about faculty but typically they make it free for Educational Institutions I believe and faculty.

The website is:


http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=15421056

Yeah it says free for educators as well..

Thanks, dallas, but the link says the free version for educators is for "educational use only". I'm not teaching autocad, I need it for my practice! So I can't ethically get the free version.

Four thousand bucks - woof. If one of my students gets it I may look over their shoulder and see if I like it.

Consider it this way:

You are educating yourself as to whether or not you like the software.

Anonymity has its perks.

so excited. can't wait to download when i get home later. i can finally get rid of my Windows partition

and with rhino and outlook coming to the mac side, I predict a lot more offices "switching."

now if autocad could do truetype searchable text to PDF, then I'd be happy. no more tedious vectorworks or overlaying text in illustrator.

revit next?

I have had the beta now for a few months and it's really been nice to see exactly what everyone else does. No more guessing.

$4k is steep though.

No, Donna, they want EVERYONE who teaches to use it regardless of whether or not they teach the program. It'll have that educational version watermark on it. It is helpful for testing whether or not you are exporting DWGs correctly or opening DWGs that Vectorworks has trouble with.

If it is like previous Education Only Autodesk software it's all good until you try and print - then you see the big FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY on your drawings.

Opening in a commercial copy won't get rid of it either. We had an intern bring home some office drawings and work in the educational version once and we had to practically perform voodoo magic to get our file cleaned...

Who has an extra $4k for a piece of software these days?

I don't and I don't know of anyone who does. Make it $1k if you have a license of Vectorworks or Archicad?

I downloaded it this morning and I've been using it all day. So far so good, with a nice clean and intuitive interface.

The FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY thing can easily be cropped out in Acrobat if you're plotting PDFs.

I've been a beta tester for a few months now, and constantly got questions about it when one of my classmates would look at my screen (Mostly "When is it coming out"). There are a couple things I don't particularly like about the Mac version (mainly due to using the Windows version for well over a decade) but I've already started to get used to them.

Now if Rhino can get going full steam ahead so that their plug-in people start making Mac versions (V-ray....you make one for sketchup would it be that hard to port it over for Rhino?). It is kind of nice only having to open my Windows partition for rendering.

You called it, make. At $1k, I would probably buy it. But I'm a sole prop who works from home on tiny projects.

yarr!

Probably another 15 years before Revit makes it over... Sigh...

Is anybody else having trouble downloading AutoCAD for students?

I continue to receive an Install Error message from the Akamai Client Installer?

Yes, Donna, I am in the same boat as you. I can do $ 1 k, but I have other expenses.

My beta copy is still working. I wonder when it expires?

call me when they get revit on the mac. we're never going back to autocad, so it doesn't mean very much to me or the firm.

now, if someone wants to drop 30K in my lap... i'll convert the office to apple and we'll deal with the partitioning...

oh, and if autodesk REALLY wanted people to make the switch, they'd run the same pricing option graphisoft does (to address donna's and make's comments): just rent the program on an hourly, as needed basis. graphisoft will lease, essentially, archicad in 300 hour blocks - no upfront cost, no long term commitment. they also apply the first 1500 you spend that way towards the purchase of a full license (at 4250). finally, they also sell an archicad lt type option (a less loaded up version) for 1995. not sure if the pay per use applies towards that one or not.

and no, i'm not paid by graphisoft for the preceding endorsement. i've had to deal with both in the service of running a purchasing co-op geared towards a/e firms. autodesk was/is just the biggest bully on the block. i've been much more impressed with graphisoft the company, even though we use revit.

at $4250 archicad is also priced insanely. At $1295 VectorWorks seems to be the best bang for the buck. It does BIM. Yay! As a small practitioner, I'd be inclined to learn new software package in order to save 3 grand.

Renting software licenses by the hour just makes no sense. That's the last source of stress (forgetting to close your program at the end of the day) you want to add to a a career rich in stressful goodness.

It was a real bargain when you could buy an unneeded license from someone. I saved probably $500 when I did that. Vectorworks Architect, I think, is $1995 now. I maybe wrong but I think that's right. It's a decent program and my drawings look great. Working with others is more difficult but not impossible.

i'll admit that this is a significant development, but why are you all so excited about getting to use this outdated, archaic software on your hi tech new macs machines?

for the record i'll prob download it too, it's just the tone that concerns me

Because we don't like getting our pretty Macs dirty by having to download Windows on them to run Autocad. At least, that's what I've heard from others (and gamers, too, which I totally don't get).

yeah, but if your using a mac platform, why use autocad at all?

Well, it's nice to be able to check stuff that I send to my mechanical engineer. Vectorworks dialogue box asks which scale you want to export to and it's not as straightforward as you think it is. I need to check it again but when I was exporting to 1 to 1 my stuff would arrive in Autocad at 1:48. I was able to correct it because I had Autocad. This saved many phone calls and retained some good will on the project.

Otherwise, I agree with you Bossman.

I use ArchiCAD and have for 7+ years exclusively it's far better than AUtoCAD but I wanted to download AutoCAD just out of curiosity. ArchiCAD is far better than Vectorworks or AutoCAD in my opinion. But the support for ArchiCAD sucks. I had to learn it on my own at first and now I'm a pro but at least with AutoCAD they have real support.