Hi guys,

So what do you use to connect GPS to Macs? There is no way in hell I am going to be using or purchasing a Windows box for anything that I do, so it looks like my options are fairly limited. If you are a Mac user, what's your experience with GPS integration?

Thanks!

Garmins slowly getting there mac software running. You can now download their maps to the GPS from the Mac, but they still don't have an Mapsource program yet. Hopefully sometime soon. You can update the firmware via the Mac, there are some others programs that do allow you pull down waypoints and routes from the GPS. If you have the USB Forerunners or EDGE GPS, they do have a mac version of their training center. It's not the same as the windows version, but close.

Their windows software does work well under Parallels, which is what I'm using until they finally get there act together for the mac.

I use BootCamp on my MacBook Pro to interface with my Garmin GPS. And yeah, it would be great if Garmin ported Mapsource to OSX soon. They were supposed to roll out OSX support in Q4, 2006.

I haven't used this software, but you could try checking out MacGPSPro . It's supposed to work with many Garmin GPSr's and OSX.

I have not tried this on my mac, mainly because I have a PC laptop that I tend to travel with so I have always loaded mapsource on it, but wouldn't Virtual PC work? someone else might be able to chime in with actual experience.

Yes Virtual PC works unless you have a new intel mac (I had it on my old Tibook specifically for the Garmin programs), for the current machines you need either bootcamp, Parallels or possibly VMWare Fusion (I think that's what it's called, it was just GA'd a few weeks ago). That's the current products that will run windows on a intel mac.

Before Intel Mac's, which have the ability to run Windows at native (Bootcamp) or near-native (VMWare Fusion) CPU speeds, I tried using Virtual PC on my Powerbook G4 laptop to run Garmin Mapsource. Unfortunately, it performed so slowly that it was too painful to use.

At the time, I was using a Garmin GPS V, which connected with a serial cable. The serial data rate with the Keyspan USB-to-serial adapter I was using was so slow through virtualization that Mapsource kept timing out and losing connection with the GPS.

However, if your Mac is a very fast G5 model, VirtualPC could work, but don't expect great performance. WindowsXP SP2 will feel very slow, like a 500MHz P4 at best.