Yeah.
Well, I got a old version of Max 7 lying around, and since I was interested in starting to model some more precise stuff, was wondering:
Did anyone play with 3DsMax 2012/2011 Design? Does it feature any precision modelling tools?..
The other option would be Solidworks. Funnily enough, I did play with it as well, and consider that it’s quite intuitive.
Get good at Solidworks. 3Dmax is for monsters.
Hey now, character designers and visual effects artists are people too. I’d hardly call them monsters 
Yeah.
Somehow the texturing methods/rendering of Solidworks is annoying, and that’s why I’m asking.
But yeah, is there anybody doing product design with 3dsmax?
You can use Max for creating pictures, but it is not capable of doing the proper CAD work needed for any type of production.
If you want to use it as a rendering package, export your data from Solidworks and into Max as a mesh, and then you can texture/render it to your hearts content.
It simply isn’t the correct tool for product design beyond making pretty pictures.
…or Inventor, right?
Inventor is a proper CAD package, so yes. Solidworks, Inventor, Pro Engineer, Catia, are all solid parametric modellers. Rhino and Alias can also do precise 3D NURBS surfacing, but lack the parametric (features defined by parameters and dimensions) that the others are based around.
Wikipedia is good at shedding more light on the specific terms if you want to learn more.