“Literally, everything has changed since then, from how we collaborate to how we think about design, and the computers themselves have changed.” The Computers Are ChangingĬsanady doesn’t think that desktops or workstations no longer matter, but our conversation did reveal an apt metaphor. “It means the CAD tools being used today were all designed for the needs of the 1990s,” he shoots back. I asked Csanady to unpack those comments a bit because it seems so trite to characterize the CAD industry in those terms. The biggest problem with CAD-with the legacy solutions-is it is tough to buy, very hard to use, and it is essentially unchanged for the last 30 years.” “If you look at Shapr3D, it’s really aggressive. “Our success is that we are solving a real customer problem,” he injects. Instead, Shapr3D is tapping into some unmet needs not envisioned by the CAD industry’s incumbent leaders.Ġ1 – Shapr3D is a relatively new and powerful product design and CAD tool exclusively for the Apple iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and now also for Apple Macs that are ARM-based computers-which will be all Mac computers in the next few years. If that were the case, if Apple had that kind of power, you would see vastly more CAD applications from the Windows world come on over to Apple’s platforms. “I think we are probably the fastest growing CAD system since SolidWorks, adds Csanady, “which is really quite remarkable considering we have only been available on the Apple iPad Pro.”Īnd Shapr3D’s success and significant numbers of customers isn’t some “halo effect” of being on a popular Apple device either. The Transformation of CADĪnd it took Shapr3D vastly less time to acquire so many customers than the acquisition of the web-based CAD upstart OnShape. “It’s pretty cool if you consider that OnShape had 5,000 paying customers,” says Csanady, referring to the Boston-based CAD company acquired in 2019 by Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), also of Metro Boston. The biggest problem with CAD-with the legacy solutions-is it is tough to buy, very hard to use, and it is essentially unchanged for the last 30 years.Īnother remarkable fact that Csanady shared with me on our call is that it has over 16,000 paying customers.

Shapr3d without apple pencil