Can I use my MAC with Adobe Illustrator ?

If the new RIP reads PDF(Do not know if it does), there should be no problem as long as you save the file in the right color space. I still prefer to use export raster files @300ppi no anti alias... and do my final adjustments in adobe photoshop. You would be able to do this on your Apple as well. The reason for this is the files I use are used for multiple projects and I get the best results by adjusting saturation, brightness and contrast to fit what I'm looking for.

We do all our designs on our Macs using Adobe Suite, then export to a shared network folder as PNG, JPG or Tiff. I do have a laptop with the Windows 7 in the printer room so I can use the rip software and setup the graphics for printing. This works great for us.

I run a Mac with adobe suite as well. I put parallels with windows 7 for the rip. it's just more convenient for me that way. I take everything into photoshop and size it and fix it up in there then save it as a png file. Then open it up in the rip and print.