“Mac users are fortunate to have not one, but two excellent commercial virtualization software packages to choose from, not to mention less-polished free alternatives like Virtual Box,” J.R. Bookwalter writes for Macworld. “In what has now become an annual ritual, VMware and Parallels have updated their respective Fusion and Parallels Desktop products to coincide with the recent release of macOS Sierra.”
“Last year, both companies delivered ambitious new versions to capitalize on back-to-back debuts of Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan, but the 2016 editions are somewhat more subdued by comparison,” Bookwalter writes. “VMware marked the occasion by launching Fusion 8.5, a maintenance update with no new features.”
Bookwalter writes, “Having celebrated its tenth anniversary for Desktop earlier this year, Parallels encouraged engineers to come up with at least one unique new feature to justify the upgrade to version 12…”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you have to slum it with Windows, you might as well do it a cleanly and safely as possible by doing it on your Mac!
I know I’m sounding like a pain in the ass right now, but I’m honest and true. When are they going to make a similar solution for Windows users? There is this graphics production program that I want, but I can’t use it because I’m on a temp Windows box right now. Please tell me there is one that can be used without breaking the law.
In case anybody runs into this issue, I know this isn’t about parallels, but VMware fusion (competitor). I had an issue running VMware and Win10 Pro, and the drag and drop between the VM and Mac was not working properly, found out the issue was if you are trying to use and administrator account in Windows, it disables a bunch of stuff. You have to create a different user account, and then everything worked. Even VM tech support couldn’t figure this out. Microsoft’s convoluted logic now dictates that the admin account is pretty much worthless. So if parallels users have an issue, they might want to check if they are running Win 10 in admin mode.
You just saved a lot of time for a bunch of people figuring out a strange problem due to OS (in this case Windows). Here’s another one: Mac System Integrity Protection (SIP), a feature since 10.11. It keeps malware from installing in certain system folders and prevents apps from selecting a boot disk. Certain legacy apps won’t instalk with SIP on. Search Google for the Terminal command to temporarily disable SIP. I couldn’t reinstall on a Mac Pro, stopped cold after the installer began. Disabled SIP and the installer worked.
A “nearly perfect blend” eh? With the only imperfect part being Windows…
I’ve been using Parallels since version 4. Its rock solid but you had better like the idea of “subscription” software. Every time Windows or Mac does an upgrade they make you buy a new version of Parallels. Basically I just plan on sending them $49 a year from now on. I only need Parallels because of Excel and Visio. If they ever come up with full functioning copies for the Mac that will be a Very happy day. (Please don’t post talking about Numbers, Excel 16 for Mac, or Omingraffle or Lucid Charts for very simple applications yes, for what I do nope won’t work).