I worked in architectural CAD for a number of years (as a software engineer, not an architect), and this surprises me. Sure you needed a PC with a little bit of beef to work in it smoothly, but not unaffordably beefy. A not all that recent macbook was good enough for pretty much all of our customers. I left the company in 2019, and plenty of people were still working on a 2012 macbook on the latest version. My own dev machine was a 2015 macbook.
We did offer cloud rendering as a subscription service, but most people just did big renders overnight, and that was usually animations, not single-frame renders.
I'm curious which CAD software is such a bear that cloud desktop was worth it. Whether the particular industry was just that incredibly complex, or if the product was just slow and inefficient.
The details are hazy, and our paths don't cross any more, so I can't say for sure. Yes, overnights were still done in some cases, but they were able to do more 'in day' smaller renders (IIRC) that was making it worthwhile.
IIRC... she done some consulting work for a particular firm, and they were investigating cloud stuff. When they chose that vendor, she saw how much of an impact that was making, and contacted the cloud vendor and became a salesperson/evangelist.
You were on a MacBook. They were all in the Windows/MS world, so perhaps there was something about that software that just was 'better on windows in the cloud'. Again, sorry I can't remember too many more details. I do suspect times have changed some, so the ROI may not be there any longer (and maybe wasn't there at the time for many folks).
The mystery deepens. I mentioned my mac because it's an easier comparison to make, but we were cross platform and I also had a contemporary ThinkPad. In fact, I worked mostly on the ThinkPad because I preferred Visual Studio to XCode.
Most of our customers did stick to mac, though. A lot of architects fancy themselves designers and really buy into Apple's marketing towards creatives.
We did offer cloud rendering as a subscription service, but most people just did big renders overnight, and that was usually animations, not single-frame renders.
I'm curious which CAD software is such a bear that cloud desktop was worth it. Whether the particular industry was just that incredibly complex, or if the product was just slow and inefficient.