What is the best computer/software

I am getting a new computer/laptop. I am thinking a macbook. What is your suggestion for a laptop that would work the best with the Glowforge? Any particular software? I’m not the most computer knowledgeable :slight_smile:

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Fusion 360. Free, you can start simple but it has the power to take you anywhere. Doesn’t care if you use a mac or pc.

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Welcome to the forum. As far as hardware and OS I couldn’t recommend one flavor or another. Since the interaction with the Glowforge is going to be browser based, it really doesn’t matter. So whatever operating system has the best choice of the design software you will end up using. I most likely will be using Ubuntu Linux and open source design software, Inkscape primarily. I am slowly learning 3D modeling with Onshape since you can use it for free. I was thinking about Fusion 360 but I like the idea of having everything cloud based and OS agnostic.

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Friend of mine got a mac…not sure if MacBook or a desktop…he set it up to run both mac os and windows. …amazing thing is that he can have both open next to each other and even copy stuff between win and mac os… not sure how he did it, but gives the possibility of both worlds…

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Welcome to the forum!

The setup that gets the most testing at the office is:
Mac
Illustrator
Chrome browser

Windows, Inkscape, and Safari (on mac) get a fair bit of love too. Anything else should work but may be a bit buggier at first as we shake out the problems.

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Awesome. I’ve got all those.

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This is great news as your primary testing platform is exactly what I’m using.

I used Parallels when I needed to run both Mac OS and Windows. It worked great. A few years ago I completely cut the rope and now run everything I need on the Mac. While Macs are more expensive than most Windows computers, you really have everything ready to run on these systems and the ability to run Windows if it’s really needed.

If you don’t need to run the two operating systems at the same time and are willing to wait for the computer to reboot and switch operating system, this can be done with bootcamp that is built into the Mac OS.

By the way, if you want to use Linux Parallels will allow do that as well, basically any operating system that runs on an Intel style processor.

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