Apple computers are great. I love my MacBook, however, I haven't been able to find any decent circuit design and simulation software that runs on a Mac. This brings me to a question: If Mac OS X has no professional electronics design software, then Mac electronics are designed on PC's?
This would be interesting news for "MacFanaticsPCHaters" and for all of us trying to develop hardware on a Mac.
"What circuit design and simulation software runs on a Mac?"
The list of software tools for electronics design includes a bunch of tools that run on the Macintosh. Some of those tools, such as McCAD, were originally designed to run on a Macintosh. After Mac OS switched to a Unix base (starting with Mac OS X), quite a few tools originally designed to run on Unix were ported to the Mac.
"What software is used to design and simulate mac computer, ipod and iphone circuits?"
I do not know, but this reminds me of a funny story. One story (perhaps apocryphal) as repeated by Gordon Bell in 1997:
"Seymour Cray ... When asked what kind of CAD tools he used for the CRAY1 he said that he liked #3 pencils with quadrille pads. He recommended using the back sides of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant.
When he was told that Apple had just bought a Cray to help design the next Mac, Seymour commented that he had just bought a Mac to design the next Cray."
According to the Cray Supercomputer FAQ, Apple's Cray did a lot of work in the design of the metal molds used to produce the outer case of Macintosh computers -- the Cray simulated the 3D flow of plastic and rendered it as Quicktime movies. Although I hear that wasn't the original reason Apple bought the Cray.
They (Apple) most likely use PCs and Altium, OrCAD, or something of that type. Given the tight integration with the enclosures in many Apple products I would think that Altium is the best fit.
Most professionals aren't into the entire 'fan boy' attitude. You use whatever is the best tool for the job. Apple doesn't even go after the workstation market from what I've seen outside the graphics/video/content creation fields.
In an example of what I mean, for a very long time www.micosoft.com was hosted on Linux servers. It wasn't moved to Windows servers until they developed a web server OS that didn't suck (it took them awhile).
For hobby use Eagle and DipTrace should be sufficient and run on Macs.
You can always just boot up a Windows VM and use whatever you want. Also, although Altium doesn't work all that well, it uses Direct3D for rendering and VM performance isn't all that great yet. I am not sure if OrCAD is using any 3D rendering nowadays.
That is an interesting question but I imagine that Mac hardware developers would rather work on some Sun workstations running some crappy commercial Unix than a PC. :P Chip design is still mostly done on Unix AFAIK.
For the hobbyist:
You can you Eagle for PCB layout and schematics.
There is (or rather was, but can be still downloaded) MiSugar for simulation.
I have also used ngspice from command line and MacSpice for plotting but they do not offer any schematic capture.
Many years ago, my Apple Hardware Design friends (including chip designers) used to design stuff using Unix workstations. Now they use Macs (which are Unix workstations, come to think of it), and Xgrid to distribute the insanely large simulation jobs.
I run LTSpice on my Mac using WINE. I also run MacSpice, EagleCAD and KiCad. Last time I checked the gEDA tools, they didn't immediately compile and work.
I'm about to try out iCircuit, which looks more basic and costs $10, but has a nice UI. There is a free Java simulator on which iCircuit is based, but it's not a Mac UI.
