Mathcad Prime 5.0: some new updates

I just keep thinking about what would have happened if PTC had spent their effort continuing on mathcad 16 instead of going towards Prime, which was a useless effort ... What a bad decision from some managers at PTC !

I never looked at Prime, as people were saying that it was not good, and light years from Mathcad 15... But now that there was Prime 4.0 , I wanted to compare with Mathcad 15 that I know well... so I did that today.

First I converted a mathcad "capability" file I had for mathcad 15 with all kinds of features to Prime 4.0.

First conclusion : the converter is quite bad, and basically useless for the numerous complex files I have written in mathcad15 through the years... I had to copy and paste pieces of the converted file to see what was working and what was not...

1) The new "look" of mathcad :  I don't know what people think, but mathcad 15 looks more professional to me than Prime, and the rubban don't seem very practical compared to the menus of mathcad15 that seem more intuitive to me, easier and faster to use.

2) The speed ?  On the same computer , large loops with a log computation in the loop are now almost twice slower with prime 4.0 than they were with Mathcad 15 ! On the other hand, large matrices computation seem to have improved in speed by a factor of 3. So speed might be a wash, which is not good. You want newer software to be always faster not slower ...

3) Matlab component is not supported ( but it was not working well in mathcad15), components like the slider and the buttons are not supported.

4) The symbolic equation solver is not supported yet.

5) Some of my 3D graphs ( scatter plot for example) need to be substituted for contour plots that are not as good... The picture operator needed also to be replaced with contour plots in greyscale, for which the greyscale granularity is not good enough and cannot be modified. Certainly not impressed with the plots .

6) The hyperlink capability that was allowing me to jump quickly in large files doesn't seem to be supported.

7)  ... and where are the e-books, and the quick links ?!  They were great, you could just drag and paste the examples in a split second... For example if I need to look at some DSP, I see that some of the DSP examples that used to be in the e-books are now on the net , but the drag and paste doesn't work, and the copy and paste doesn't seem to work well either... One of the great idea of mathcad ( the e-book) is gone !

😎 I stopped looking at Prime 4.0 before investigating any further to see if maybe, Prime had fixed some of the memory leaks of mathcad 15... Maybe Prime 4.0 is better than mathcad 15 in that area, but because of the Prime 4.0 numerous shortcomings I will never know... We will see if Prime 5.0 or 6.0 one day come back to the level of mathcad 15... It looks to me like 10 years of development have been lost !

To me, a professional tool that was mathcad 15, was replaced by a product Prime 4.0 ,  that looks "unfinished" and not really usable , what a pity ! 

LOL!

And all new customers will have to pay a subsription every year until 2023 for no updates

"Beyond Prime 4.0" could mean anything. Sure, all those things (which for Plot improvements and Functionality we already have in MC 15) will be available in Prime 6.0*10^6

The "update" is that they blew the release date for Prime 5.0. As far as Mathcad goes, it seems to be the one thing PTC has a real talent for.

What are you expecting to get anyway? All the releases of Prime so far have been a disappointment, even with low expectations before the release. Maybe Prime 5.0 would get past the feeble plotting capabilities of Prime, since that was slated for 4.0, but I wouldn't bank on it. Maybe it wasn't in Prime 4.0 because they just dropped it.

Now that you have to pay an annual subscription simply to access your existing worksheets (if you purchased after they switched to subscription only, of course) they don't need to give you anything significant in an update, so don't expect them to do so. Blackmail (pay or lose access to your worksheets) is so much easier, and cheaper, than providing value for money.

Good question, Steve.