Anybody using Mac for Polar or Cycling Peaks?

[Wanna B]

My old PC is getting tired and I'm shopping for something new. I'm looking at a Mac but am looking for experiences running Windows on one for cycling software.

[Brownie]

I know Justen Winster brought his sweet Mac desktop to the S.C camp in Feb and was downloading all of his Stats on to there and am pretty sure it worked fine.

[A.J]

I'm pretty sure that macs are compatable with just about all polar software as much as i dislike macs ha ha. I don't think there would be any problems

[226.2]

Mac running OS X Tiger or Leopard:

1. is NOT directly polar compatible. If you are in windows via Bootcamp anything works, if you use a virtual machine such as Parallels it will work but ONLY with the Polar USB 2 adapter, not the larger, USB 1 adaptor. I use Parallels so I don't have to reboot. If you don't want to buy Parallels there is a free version of software which is similar (forget the name). If you have to use Windows for work Parallels is worth it, you can run windows apps directly in OS X.

2. Power tap software is supposed to work directly on mac, but only if you have the usb cradle version, I don't. It is also supported for some flavors of Linux.

3. Cycling peaks works fine under Parallels, including Power Tap downloads.

4. Garmin training software/downloads works fine under Parallels.

5. There is some free mac software that is supposed to work for polar downloads and I had a look at it and it looked like too much hassle, but the it is free.

6. There is a mac training software product that claims to directly download Polar on the mac but I didn't pursue it, as it was my understanding that the files you get are NOT compatible with the Polar software (so if you tried to send them to Chris he couldn't view them).

By the Mac, you'll like it.