That title is bait for resident Australians, because AutoCad LT 2013 has only just been released in the US (late March), and has not yet been released in the UK (I’ve been reading complaints about this on the Autodesk forum.) So as far as I’m aware, it’s not yet available in Australia.
Moving to the USA to get an $899 copy of AutoCad from the Apple App store? Priceless.*
OK, gloating aside, I’ve been holding off my purchase of a new license for a while, and only in part because I knew I was moving to the US where it’s cheaper (sorry folks). I had been thinking about permanently moving my drafting to DraftSight, but I eventually decided that if they were giving away, for free, a version of CAD that I had paid over $2000 for, maybe the technology had moved on in the six or seven years since I had last paid for a seat.
AutoCad now runs natively in MacOS for starters (not that draftsight doesn’t), which removed one more irritating thing about running AutoCad on my current computer. I had run my 2005 LT license on a laptop since I got it in 2005 (incidentally, I’d been running the 2005 version for the year before this while I worked at Lotterywest – Autodesk like to make the issue date in the future for some odd reason), and when I was convinced to switch to Mac in 2007 by Turbo when my former laptop died, I had to run AutoCad in a windows virtualiser. If you’ve ever used CAD in a virtualised environment, you’ll know it’s highly, highly annoying. And you have to keep updating your virtualiser (thanks Parallels) and if you change, to say, VirtualBox, it can become just downright unstable.
It reached a head after I arrived in Seattle and set up my computer and printer again. Whether I wanted to print a PDF or an actual document, AutoCad would crash. Being able to design and draft wonderful works is one thing, but not being able to get them off your machine? Kinda pointless.
So yesterday I got a new copy of AutoCad.
It’s ah-maze-zing. For realz.
I was playing around with it, acclimatising, if you will, and kept musing out-loud as to the wonders I was experiencing. In kinda short burts. “Oh, woooow.” And “Unbelieveable.” And “Whoa mama!” All interspersed with bursts of chuckling and even some giggles.
It led CSS, our roomate, to comment over dinner that the fried chicken we were having was really good, in fact “Almost AutoCad good.”
Yep, AutoCad LT 2013. It’s better than chicken.
*not actually priceless, still $899, as listed. Or AU $867.