Parallels on rMBP 13"

Bootcamp will provide better performance. However, for your needs Parallels will still be great.

That being said, you could always install Windows on Bootcamp and run Parallels with your Bootcamp partition. That way, you can use both.

 

Hello OP...

As a person who's been using Parallels for a while, both on my MBA and now on my rMBP...I can tell you I haven't seen any problems. Runs great on my rMBP with 8GB of ram, and honestly ran fairly well on my 4GB MBA

My cousin was using bootcamp until he tried my AIR with Parallels and switched immediately...His reasoning was pointed in the direction of how smooth and easy it was to toggle back and fourth between os's...And that was on a 4GB MBA.

So i'd definitely recommend Parallels to anyone looking into running windows on their Mac based machine.

 

I think someone always has to say this when these questions are posted so it might as well be me this time. It sounds like you are doing most of your work with Windows. Perhaps a machine designed for Windows would be a better choice. Buying a Mac and then running Windows most of the time makes no sense to me. There are a bunch of Windows PCs out there with 1920 displays. That's still pretty high resolution for a 13" display.

It's a shame that Sony no longer sells the Z -- it was a great machine.

 

I certainly agree with you on the trackpad!

I use Parallels on my 15" and the few apps I run there seem to work normally. If I full screen it one can forget it's not "normal" Windows pretty easily. I have had issues with some video capture software -- it taps into the video driver and it's not happy under Parallels. Gaming can be a problem too.

You can run Parallels in Coherence mode and your Windows apps appear on the same desktop as the Mac apps. The downside is you have a VM running the whole time and uses memory. If you are going to go with any VM, get the 8GB 13" for sure

 

You can control the amount of RAM, video memory, the number of processors, and HD space that Parallels uses. On my 8gb quad core, I allocate 2gb and 2 cpus. If I really feel like I need more power under windows I go to 3 cpus and 4 gb of ram.

 

I have a 2011 MBA 13in /4GB with parallels and work fine but a strain on the ram. I just upgraded to the 15 rMBP with 16 GB because of wanting to run parallels on it. PERFECT and smooth. I wanted to make sure I had enough ram to run this machine Highly recommend it for parallels.

 

If you have min. 8 GB RAM *and* SSD then go with Parallels. Especially if you don't have much disk space. It's quite fast, even if you put the disk in external, still fast because no paging file created.

 

I do freelance as a tech repair specialist and one of my work machines is the Macbook Pro 13" with 2 SSDS and 16GB RAM and I can use parallels for windows/linux and attach external devices to repair with ease, no slowdown feels native to me.

I did try a game once too MMO Lord of the Rings it ran okay but as no DGPU could only test medium settings.

Parallels is a very good application but if you ever need to run XP I recommend VMWare for that I always found it stronger for the old OS.

 

I used Parallels for a bit, but am using VMware Fusion now on my rMBP 13". It runs great. Parallels ran great too. I'm only using Fusion because I own it and I do a lot of VMware with work and its easy to copy VMs between systems.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 run fine with 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM. I was using 4 GB of RAM, but I didn't notice much improvement within Windows, but I did notice a slowdown in the Mac. It also took longer to pause / suspend the VM because of the additional RAM.

I try and run as many applications in Mac as I can. I use Office for Mac. I have Office for Windows installed but only use the apps that aren't available on the Mac like Visio and OneNote. I also run my other work applications that don't run on Mac.

I also tried Bootcamp a while back and wasn't a fan. Yes, it performed better for things like games. I feel like Apple didn't put much effort into the drivers. Especially for the trackpad. Wasn't as slick as in OS X.

 

Highly recommend Parallels, too.

Works flawless, has very tight integration and better support for Retina Screens than VM Fusion according to some tests.

 

Yes it is just a pc installation so a virus program is recommended, you can do snapshots so just revert if something went wrong.

To copy files from OSX you need to edit the VM options to enable sharing or select folders/mapped drives to include in Parallels.