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Deals: Buy Parallels Desktop 18 and Get 14 Mac Apps for Free, Including Fantastical and Cardhop
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You’re not buying. You’re renting a bunch of apps.
Yep, too many web sites like this pushing Parallels when there is an excellent free for personal use product in the market like VMware Fusion.
Yikes - looks like subscriptions just killed the app bundle concept. I miss the early MacHeist days 
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Everyone who defends software rental misnamed as a "subscription", this is what we've come to.
Subscriptions you keep the product at the end. Rental you no longer get to keep.
What a nightmare this is. Call it the "Cancel everything in Jan 24 Bundle".
Subscriptions you keep the product at the end. Rental you no longer get to keep.
What a nightmare this is. Call it the "Cancel everything in Jan 24 Bundle".
Yeah, last I checked, Parallels still offers a perpetual license. And on my M1 MacBook Pro, Parallels downloaded and installed Windows Arm automatically and with no licensing issues. Activated fine with a retail Windows key.
If you have the full version of Acrobat Pro, then you certainly won't need this, but I won't pay the AU$30 a month for it.
- Turn scanned pdf's into editable pdfs, thus you can also
- Add text, modify text in the pdf
- Sign pdf's using your own signature, or digital signature
- It has stamps to mark the pdf's (and I find this useful occasionally)
- Draw, sticky notes, etc
- Fillout forms etc. (I would love it if I could create forms)
- You can merge and reorder pdf pages (although you can do that in Mac Preview)
- I use it a lot to reduce the size of a pdf.
- Convert to other formats.
- You can lock it and secure it. Add passwords etc.
I note that it is now a subscription (AU$10 per month or AU$219.99 lifetime). I got it when it was a reasonable price and got it in one of those bundles.
Subscriptionware. Or Rentware.
Software pirates are people who think they can get something for nothing, or for very little effort on their part. Just because much of today's software is now available (often exclusively) as a SaSS offering, does that then excuse you for ripping off the developers and paying them nothing for their efforts?
Sadly, PDF Expert does not offer much that Adobe Acrobat won't already give you. I've spent a considerable amount of time checking out the PDF alternatives for the Mac, and most of them don't offer much value beyond that of Adobe's offering. The only difference is that most of the other offerings are less expensive albeit with less features, or an incomplete feature set. Some of the alternatives can be purchased outright rather than as a subscription like Adobe Acrobat. For most users who just want to view and do a few very basic things with PDFs, either Preview, Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit PDFReader are fine choices.
You're right in that people can often do what they want with Preview, Reader etc, and PDF Expert gives you nothing that Acrobat can't give you, but as mentioned up there somewhere ^^, the only thing I can find that Acrobat gives you is sharing and creating forms. If that isn't what you need then PDF Expert at 1/3 the cost of Acrobat is a strong choice.
No, it's not right for people to pirate software, but Adobe, like many companies, has created a business market monopoly on its products. And they charge accordingly. If they can be as greedy as they are, then you will get people on the other side of the scales doing the exact same thing.
Agreed—this could be a good value if you accept the premise that these are all one-year subscriptions with a free year. The anti-virus software market in particular is quite volatile price-wise and prone to excessive fluctuations with ridiculous deals and offerings made just to keep users in the subscription loop. For users who can manage subscriptions wisely, the offering makes some sense.
I had that with Fantastical. I had a full-functioning lifetime licence through one of these deals. It had a decent machine-learning function and worked well within the Apple ecosystem.
Then Fantastical crippled the version I had when they went subscription only. It was basically useless. it would no longer do what I paid for, so I ditched it. Apple Calendar does what I need and works properly.
I used to think that way about PDF Expert, until I actually tried using it as a daily replacement for Acrobat in my work. Many of the features are indeed there, but are often buggy, incomplete or do not work as well as Acrobat. The same goes for most other PDF software developers. Many of the bilingual PDFs I have to handle on a daily basis fail to display correctly in PDF Expert, and the app wasn't as stable as I'd hoped it would be. I may go back and revisit that app someday to see how it's evolved, but I wasn't particularly impressed by my findings last year.
The fact is, Adobe has always had the cornerstone on PDFs, for better or for worse. (Maybe "monopoly" would be a more realistic term for this...) Adobe opened up their patent on PDFs in 2008, but I really don't feel that the market has made a reader/editor that surpasses Acrobat in terms of stability and functionality. After all, Adobe developed the PDF format, nearly three decades ago.
That is true, and that may work for some people.
I also enjoyed the MacHeist bundles and similar offerings back in the day. I must admit, though, that most of the apps in the bundle just went for naught, and I never used them. I would keep them on my hard drive just because I "bought" them and it seemed a waste to trash them, but most of them just collected digital dust.Yikes - looks like subscriptions just killed the app bundle concept. I miss the early MacHeist days
Those bundles were kind of the impetus for services like Setapp, I think, although Setapp is definitely a SaSS-based offering.
You all know the reason why MR put this article up (hint: it has to do with sponsorships). Please stop complaining. No one is forcing you to use them.
One person's "complaining" is another person's "commenting".
Suck it up, Buttercup.
It seems that the brunt of the complaints are centered on the fact that the "offering" is not really something tangible that they can keep, but rather on an arguably intangible free year of use to a bunch of subscription software, which doesn't really seem like a value to many people but just an inroad to making those people continue their subscriptions and thus fork over more money.
Depends on how you look at it, really—is the glass of water half full, or half empty?
In any event, complaining is what people do here, mostly because they feel powerless to do anything useful to change the situation. ;-)
What's the origin of that phrase? It doesn't sound too complimentary. Maybe from a movie or something?
Buy Parallels Desktop 18 and Get [a one year rental of] 14 Mac Apps for Free, Including Fantastical and Cardhop
Speaking of Fantastical, BusyCal offers a very rich feature set and an actual purchased license, not a rental. It doesn't have quite the polish of Fantastical, but it's solid and gets the job done.
Speaking of Fantastical, BusyCal offers a very rich feature set and an actual purchased license, not a rental. It doesn't have quite the polish of Fantastical, but it's solid and gets the job done.