Hi Minties! Let’s talk a little about an ongoing issue that’s been on a couple of people minds lately in regards with Silhouette Studio files for printables. This does not apply only to our digital files but seems to affect every file created in the Windows version of Silhouette Studio when opened for printing on the Mac version of Silhouette Studio.

GEEK SPOILER ALERT 👩‍💻

This post can get somewhat nerdy/geeky as Mr Mint has been doing research on this. Please bear with him as he’s just trying to help explain what is happening and to have you enjoy our digital files as much as possible. 🥰 Onwards with the content!

Who is affected

This is affecting those users on newer Mac computers released with the following processor families:

Apple M2: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-and-m2-max-next-generation-chips-for-next-level-workflows/

Apple M1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1/

I’ll try giving some insight into it, from what I’ve gathered so far. 😉

The Issue

Opening the Silhouette cut files on one of these Mac computers ends up with a “processing” pop up in Silhouette Studio. It never goes away after that. Also, you could try cut files from other companies and not see this behavior.

You’re not alone on this. There is an issue with files developed in Windows and opened in a newer Mac for printing. So far this approach is not working as expected. Unfortunately we do develop our digital files on Windows machines here @ Mr + Mrs Mint. There has been a number of clients contacting us with this issue. Sadly there has not been a solution to this so far.

This is an example of the behavior of the software in one of these newer Mac computers:

Things to check

Is your Apple machine one of these ARM-based new ones? (Apple M1 or M2 chips) This support article from Apple, can help into pinpointing if your machine is one of these: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211814

These so-new machines often use a translation layer (Rosetta 2) with old/not updated Mac software in order to try to run it on these new processors. This layer translates the usual Intel Mac processor code into ARM (Apple M1/M2 processor) Mac code. These translation layers can/do create issues as the translation is often not transparent or does not include all instructions a software could use and can change the behavior of said software.

This website helps with that: https://doesitarm.com (although I could not find Silhouette Studio there yet). There could be an assortment of these kind of websites trying to give a little scoop of knowledge on software support with M1/M2 Mac.

Possibilities

As a workaround, some clients have successfully opened their designs on a Windows computer without any issue. Dirty workaround though, although available to some. 🙈

There seems to be a version of Silhouette Studio for Mac that helps in this issue. The version in question is 4.5.152 which has been reported to be able to open these files without issue. The latest, as of writing, is V4.5.180 (higher) so you may try updating to the latest version and see if that changes anything.

(Technical workaround when nothing else works: In the case of an M1/M2 mac, my mind would definitely go towards spinning up a Windows virtual machine inside macOS but that is outside of the spectrum for some Silhouette Studio owners although I do know there is a good number of geeky Minties! There are some virtualization software for this, Parallels Desktop comes to mind from my Intel Mac days)

We do not use Mac computers on Mr + Mrs Mint for developing our Silhouette Studio digital files so we have no direct way to test/diagnose this issue ourselves.

(We do use Mac minis as home servers here! Even our original Late 2012 Mac mini is doing its rounds 24/7 as our main server with Unraid! But that’s content for another geeky post! Maybe soon! 😎 )

– Mr Mint :D