Q: Connect 2 iMacs
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Sep 4, 2016 1:49 PMby Kappy,Use your local network. Initially, you can transfer or clone your iMac to another iMac using Thunderbolt or Firewire: Target Disk Mode.
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Sep 4, 2016 2:11 PMby Kappy,On your local network you can use either or both. Just as long as they connect to the network. I would suggest Ethernet because it is faster than Wi-Fi. Just use the Sharing preferences panel to enable File Sharing on both machines so you can freely copy files back and forth.
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Sep 4, 2016 7:01 PMby BobHarris,As Kappy has pointed out, put both Macs on the same network.
Assuming your data transfer needs are from time to time you need to access a file on the other Mac, then WiFi is perfectly OK.
If you intend to do bulk transfer of tons of data from one Mac to the other, then Ethernet is better. Or connecting the Macs with Thunderbolt or Firewire and using Target Disk Mode so that one Macs internal disk looks like a high speed attached external disk.
As for mirroring one screen to the other, that has a few different answers depending on what you really want to do.
You can use Target Display Mode
<Use your iMac as a display with Target Display Mode - Apple Support>
This basically turns a iMac into a dumb monitor. I've experimented with this and it does work.
If you want to use BOTH iMacs as computers, you can use a utility such as Teleport
<http://abyssoft.com/software/teleport/>
that allows you to use a single keyboard, mouse, trackpad to control 2 (or more Macs). You move your mouse pointer off of one screen onto the next and when you do that, you keyboard, mouse, trackpad input is sent to the other Mac. You can specify which edge of the screen moves control from one iMac to the other and back again. I used this a few years ago to control an iMac, a PowerMac tower, and a Macbook from my iMac.
You could also use Screen Sharing to view one Mac's screen as a window of the other. Currently I do this to view my Macbook Pro on my iMac, mostly because my 15" Macbook Pro's screen is much smaller than my 27" iMacs screen and it is easy to access the Macbook Pro via a window on my iMac.
