[gchadwick]

I suspect they'll do what many large companies do, have a server farm that has all the tools on and have engineers remotely use them from a personal machine. The server farm will be running Linux and they can use Macs as the personal machines.

Ultimately you often need a setup something like this as EDA vendors can have various rules to follow about where the binaries are kept. For implementation engineers there may be onerous terms around access to the process library files which are easier to deal with if the libraries plus the tools that use them don't go near the engineer's personal machine.

Plus an engineer may want to spin up multiple instances of tool (very common for simulation for instance) so you want easy access to a cluster for this purpose.