Note: in the ~2 years months since the post below was written, some things have changed. The 2013 Esri User Conference Q & A (July 2013) notes: “ Q: Can Esri develop a simple Mac-based viewer for ArcGIS Online?” – See the answer at. #ARCMAP FOR MAC MAC OS#Īlso, “ Q: When will Esri support native Mac OS and Mac hardware?” – See the answer at. In the late 1980s, Macintosh computers were commonplace on the desks of Esri staff. People used them to write documentation, design graphics, and write proposals. About the only thing we didn’t do with them was run Esri software.Įsri actually did make software that ran on the Apple platform at one time. This was back in the early 1981, when a short-lived product called “Gridapple” was released for the pre-Mac Apple II platform. Gridapple was the first microcomputer implementation of Esri’s raster-based “Grid” system. In the early 1990s, during the early days of ArcView, Esri was working on a port of ArcView to the Macintosh, but due to engineering challenges it never got beyond pre-release.Īs it does every year, the question came up again at the 2011 Esri International User Conference: “When will ArcGIS Run on a Mac?” This question was addressed at the UC Closing Session on Friday.

“We’d love to be on the Mac, but we have engineering priorities…so we have to ask ourselves what’s most important for our users,” said Jack Dangermond. “That focus is very important and we want to make sure that we don’t spread our resources too thin. But would you want us to slow down advancement of the basic tool in order to deploy on a Mac?” In theory, we could spread our resources more on platforms and thus less on functionality. Dangermond added “We’ll probably start moving more towards supporting the Mac at the next release after ArcGIS 10.1.” Of the approximately 1,600 people attended the Closing Session, only one or two people raised their hands.īut don’t count a Mac version of ArcGIS out yet.

Arcmap for mac