PC or Mac, not what you think

[dubliner]

Would there be any problems with using a Mac as the "design" computer & a PC as the control computer? Ideally, I will have an Ibook to take between the house & shop, and the pc will reside at the shop, can you use a flash drive to transfer files? tx Neville in Austin.

[stargategfx]

We do this all day long, half of our art department run Macs, the others PCs.
I run PCs to read the files they send me either via email or on a jump drive, and to run my Shopbots.
I have found the most success in using .ai file version 5.o or earlier when importing from a Mac.
All software has it's own peculiarities, and it will take some experimenting to find out what works best with your particular setup, but the short answer is yes it can be done with relative ease.

[waynelocke]

Ditto to Boyd. I do it all of the time. I don't have an intell Mac so I can't run the toolpathing software but I do the basic deisigning on my Mac Cad program.
Wayne

[robredick]

I have always been a Mac guy. I have an Intel Mac with Windows on it, but I just use a USB 2.0 Flash drive for file transfer to another machine that runs the bot.

[jeffreymcgrew]

Our shop is all Mac, except for the machine that feeds jobs to the Bot. We're using the new Intel-based Macs we're able to run Windows via Parallels so we're running Artcam Insignia and even the controller software (for previewing jobs) as well as some CAD programs (Revit) alongside all the Mac stuff we also use. We've got a Mac server, too, that the jobs get saved to and pulled from. For us, for several reasons, the Mac is better on the design side, enough so that paying the extra to run Windows too at the same time via Parallels is more than worth it to us.