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Parallels Desktop 15 Switches to Apple's Metal Graphics API, Gains Sidecar, Keychain, and Drag and Drop Support

nitramluap said:
Yeah, after a few years this really started to annoy me. They’d release a new version but fail to fix critical bugs in the existing version (which was otherwise fine)... and then force you to upgrade.

After the upgrade you then discover that the same bug hasn’t been fixed, rendering the entire VM unbootable and unfixable... again.

Just use Bootcamp and avoid this third party, second rate rubbish. Better yet, find ways to ditch Windows entirely.
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What a silly post. Just as one man cannot be everything and neither can one OS. Parallels is not just running about Windows, you've shown your bias straight away there.
Bootcamp is great if you don't mind rebooting.
To be as dismissive as you are then. How have they forced you to upgrade? It's your choice. Just ditch the MacOS entirely and run Windows on the hardware instead.
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thimplicity said:
Does someone know whether I could buy Parallels for home use (one-time $80) or do i HAVE to buy the business edition ($100/year) if I want to use it for business purposes.
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Let's just say that the home version still works is a business. Up to you how ethical you want to be and whether you need the extra features.
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Skeith said:
DX 11. Finally.
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This one feature is enough for me to upgrade.


I get that the upgrade is cheaper, but do you lose anything over the full?
 
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I’ve always felt that parallels has ran kind of clunky.. I use it about once or twice a week and I hate it every time I open it.
(2018 MacBook Pro with 32gb of ram. 560x)
 
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Who's running Parallels 15 with Windows 10 on a 16 GB 2017 MacBook Core m3? I'm curious as to your experiences.

Windows 7 ran fine with VMWare with an older slower 8 GB machine (with 3 GB allocated to the VM and SSD) for business applications, but I haven't tried Parallels lately.
 
I’m still on VMWare Fusion 8.5 on Sierra, but I am planning to switch back to VirtualBox because the performance has gotten awful. These commercial Hyper Visors require you upgrade every year because they know within a year, the software is will get slow and awful to use. For what I do, which is mostly reference testing, VB should be enough.
 
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Stephen.R said:
I've installed the update, and badda bing badda boom, Parallels won't launch. Suggested (they already have a support article for this) solutions are: restart; uninstall+restart+reinstall; reinstall macOS. o_O
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I installed the update an hour ago and have had zero issues, and I use it all day, everyday pretty extensively. Latest Catalina beta.
 
Loge said:
Standard edition is still limited to 8GB RAM per VM which is overdue for an update.
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I believe that will stay and it's a business decision on their part to slightly limit the home edition.

[AUT] Thomas said:
Ah, and I forgot: Their "PRO" edition is available only as subscription for "only" 100$ per year...
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Well, as a PROfessional software developer, $100/year for a product doesn't even register, I mean, it's less than an hour of my time. If I wanted to play games, I'd just get a dedicated gaming rig, or play games on consoles (I prefer the latter :) )

H2SO4 said:
Bootcamp is great if you don't mind rebooting.

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I get that the upgrade is cheaper, but do you lose anything over the full?
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I went from Parallels, made brief use of VMWare, back to Parallels - then, due to some very specific needs, I wound up switching over to BC - recently, however, I went back to Parallels (currently on v14), because I was moving back and forth between OSs enough to where it was hassle, and the mild performance hit was much less of an issue. I mostly prefer MacOS as my primary computing platform, so with Windows back in a VM, I get that, and I'm also able to do neat stuff like develop a native mobile app in XCode __and__ the backend with VS/IIS/MSQL concurrently (the MS based tools on the Mac still aren't quite there). I'm also running in Coherence which works really well.

The other big driver was me moving to a 32GB machine ('18 Mini), with more limited resources, it's nice to have them all dedicated to a single OS, but with 32 (or possible 64) GB of RAM, tossing 16GB at the Win10 VM leaves plenty of RAM for the host (MacOS).

FYI, upgrades are just a license model, no difference vs. an outright non-upgrade purchase (I'm on like my 5th upgrade, and I always score them later in the product cycle, so usually it's only $39).
 
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Pro and Business Editions have a $99 / year subscription price.

Users with older versions of Parallels Desktop (including Pro and Business Editions) can upgrade for $49.99
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I thought the idea behind software subscriptions was free updates to software ?
 
My experience:
  1. I run Parallels 14 for Mac with WIN10 and its apps on a separate space.
  2. This is on my MBPr (16G memory).
  3. Its use is to launch native WIN10 apps, unavailable otherwise under macOS -- nothing graphics intensive.
Gotchas:
  1. avoid "coherence" like the plague (i.e. running WIN10 apps with MacOS apps on colocated window space).
  2. Parallels is a memory pig, so assign as much memory to Parallels as is sensible, while not starving macOS and its apps. [Check macOS Activity Monitor for memory pressure -- i.e. swap used.]
  3. when running Parallels you become captive -- there are no automated ways to escape Parallel's virtual environment and migrate your apps and its file systems to bare metal WIN10 hardware.
After that, my overall experience is OK. [Ah... my backups are macOS bootable copies using Carbon Copy Cloner.]
So, other than those gotchas, all aces/s

[And, yes, the yearly $49.99 upgrades are annoying after a few iterations.]
 
Plutonius said:
Pro and Business Editions has a $99 / year subscription price.

I thought the idea behind software subscriptions was free updates to software ?
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Maybe that's an update for a version that pre-dates their moving to a subscription based license? (and certainly it applies to the home version). You are of course correct, if you're on a current Biz Sub, the update is "free".
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TheShadowKnows! said:
when running Parallels you become captive -- there are no automated ways to escape Parallel's virtual environment and migrate your apps and its file systems to bare metal WIN10 hardware.
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It's not particularly "automated" (and a few steps), but there are some ways to do this (assuming the Window activation doesn't get whacked ... :D)
 
Didn't solve my issue in Catalina "Shared Profile functionality doesn't work in virtual machines", rendering it basically useless. Issue logged again with Parallels.
 
[AUT] Thomas said:
In times of eGPUs it's a joke that there's no PCIe pass-through so that the external GPU can be DIRECTLY accessed by the virtual machine.
In Windows it's the same issue, but already implemented at least partly.

Ah, and I forgot: Their "PRO" edition is available only as subscription for "only" 100$ per year...
Thanks but no thanks...
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50
 
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D.T. said:
Well, as a PROfessional software developer, $100/year for a product doesn't even register, I mean, it's less than an hour of my time. If I wanted to play games, I'd just get a dedicated gaming rig, or play games on consoles (I prefer the latter :) )
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Headless Mode... that's why. Don't need to be a DEV to take advantage of that. Charging extra for that is ripoff. In fact you can launch headless from the command line in parallels standard edition, but the GUI doesn't properly support that.
Also I don't need a subscription for the next version, because the host doesn't get newer OSX updates.
 
can confirm that its quite a bit faster than Parallels 13. using pro version. only use it for trading software where I have dozens of charts up with indicators or strategies and things have definitely sped up, hopefully they can keep improving it throughout the year
 
Parallels has completely alleviated my need to have a dedicated Windows machine for testing of my applications. They do software right by continually making improvements. The cost is reasonable and I have found the product to be better than Fusion. If you are a casual user either will work though. At $50 for each upgrade or $100/year for a subscription it is good deal. I realize there are free products that will work, but I've never had a problem. For a casual user the $80 entry point is reasonable given the quality of the product and you don't have to upgrade to every new version. A Windows VM is significantly better than a few hundred dollar Windows computer and takes up zero space.
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thimplicity said:
Does someone know whether I could buy Parallels for home use (one-time $80) or do i HAVE to buy the business edition ($100/year) if I want to use it for business purposes.
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$80 for one time usage and $50 for a version update.
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javco said:
And also a new payment
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Along with improvements. You are not forced to upgrade so there is nothing to complain about.
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gigapocket1 said:
I’ve always felt that parallels has ran kind of clunky.. I use it about once or twice a week and I hate it every time I open it.
(2018 MacBook Pro with 32gb of ram. 560x)
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I have a feeling your problem may be not having a clean version of Windows as a starting point. I am running a 2014 MacBook Pro and the various versions of Windows I use for different purposes are Windows XP, 7, 10, Server 2008 and Server 2012. None are clunky of course all were clean installs. Whenever I have created a new VM I go back to clean versions I saved on an external drive to avoid the reinstall process. It works well for me.
 
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[AUT] Thomas said:
Headless Mode... that's why. Don't need to be a DEV to take advantage of that. Charging extra for that is ripoff. In fact you can launch headless from the command line in parallels standard edition, but the GUI doesn't properly support that.
Also I don't need a subscription for the next version, because the host doesn't get newer OSX updates.
Click to expand...

My post was specifically about the price in the context of my use case (and most of the developers I know), if you've got a specific use case where the product doesn't work, it's doesn't really matter if it's $1, right? :)
 
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I held off on Parallels for several years, but last year I took the plunge. I purchased the Pro version with all the advanced features. Initially, it seemed to work reasonably well on my 16GB/2TB RAM 2017 MBP. However, it wasn't long before things went south, and I had to call tech support to fix an issue. That lasted a few weeks until it entirely hosed my system. Since then, I have been trying to weed-out the remaining files which are scattered everywhere on my mac. Removing it from your system is NO EASY task. My System Utility now reports corruption and errors. Part of the problem is likely insufficient memory. Maybe with a 32GB RAM Mac, it would behave better, but it seems to go south after any significant update, or when I used their utility to clean things' up (bad move). If I had a MacPro with true independent drives (like before), I would use it on a separate drive.

EDIT: Oh, one last thing'. It will also run your fans to max speed the second you try and use it.
 
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Every time I open Parallels on my 13-inch 2018 MacBook Pro (16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD), the fans always spin up to max power. It's irritating. I am not even doing anything heavy on Windows 10 when I boot it up. The only reason I have it is because I need access to Internet Explorer...
 
so is this likely to run fallout 4 at a passable speed on a 2017 imac? 3.5ghz i5, radeon pro 575 4gb, 24gb of ram?
 
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