About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional people offered this:ĭespite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either. The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better that was still on 2018. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this: There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.īack to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Perpetual license users were fine, of course. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing? This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply).

Autocad 2019 license