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ArcGIS Pro for Mac OS

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1
06-18-2015 09:04 PM
Status: Open
JonathonHooper
Occasional Contributor
Since ArcGIS Pro is tightly integrated within the ArcGIS Platform through ArcGIS Online, I would be eager to see ArcGIS Pro considered for Mac OS.
1 Comment
JohnMDye

This would be fantastic. Like most full-stack developers, I use a Mac but have to always ensure that I have some way of getting access to a Windows machine for the sole purpose of being able to use ArcGIS Pro when there's no other way to accomplish something.

To do this, we only have three choices:

  1. Run a Windows VM on my Mac and share the Host OS's (Mac) resources (Processor, Memory, Storage) with the Guest OS (Windows), giving me a severely underpowered Windows machine running ArcGIS even though I'm using a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro.
  2. Run a Windows Bootcamp partition, allowing me to dedicate all of my systems resources to the Windows box, but meaning that I have to completely shutdown and restart my machine any time I need to switch operating systems
  3. Run a dedicated physical machine on the same network and remote into it when necessary, which can mean having to copy files across the network at times as well as introducing network latency issues during visualization.

Truth be told, there's currently no good Esri solution for GIS in OSX, which is why I am drawn more and more to open source solutions like Boundless Desktop and QGIS. Esri could address some of this by increasing the robustness of the Python API to include some local analysis functionalities or at the very least adding File Geodatabase operations for Python API

Of course, the ultimate would be porting ArcGIS Pro to OSX but I suspect that would be a massive reengineering effort for an application that Esri has already laid much of the foundation for. So I doubt this will ever happen.