AutoCAD suitable laptop for a Mechanical Engineering freshman

[BenG54]

Hi everyone,

 

I’m starting my Mechanical Engineering degree this fall. I want to practice AutoCAD a bit before starting and get a basic understanding of it. I want to buy a laptop with a budget of 2,000-3,000 USD.

 

I am currently looking at the MacBook Pro with the M5 chip and 32GB of RAM. I've seen that it recently beaten RTX5090 GPU in blender and I've heard a lot of praise fot Unified Memory, but I’m concerned about how that translates to a professional engineering workflow, specifically for:

 

AutoCAD: I plan to do both 2D drafting and 3D modeling. I know a native macOS version exists, but are there critical missing features compared to the Windows version?

 

I'm thinking about choosing between Mac Pro M5 or a Windows Workstation/Gaming Laptop with a discrete RTX 50-series GPU.

 

I’d love to hear from anyone who has used Macs for AutoCAD or from Windows users who used a discrete GPU setup. Is the M5’s power enough for AutoCAD and if 32GB RAM is good for basic 3D, or should I just stick to a native Windows machine?

 

Thanks in advance!

[SLW210]

AutoCAD for Windows has more features than AutoCAD for Mac.

 

Compare Features: AutoCAD for Windows against AutoCAD for Mac