It’s that time of year. New version of Parallels Desktop. I seem to have been given a free update on the app. I’m not a fan of the new logo but I suppose it’s in line with the whole iOS-like rounded squares on the Mac.
Been using Parallels a lot lately, mostly to play Minecraft Bedrock Edition on my M1 MacBook Pro. It’s surprisingly good at emulating-within-eumlating-within-emulating!
Have any of you tried it? What do you think? I’m not seeing much if any difference so far.
I’ve gone off an a different course. I’m only using Windows for being able to maintain some really old software and use a Windows 2000 VM. I’ve converted the VMs to Virtual Box and since I’ve got a stack of Intel Mac minis I can run the (free) VirtualBox on them “forever”.
My productive Macs are still Intel, but I can now go to Apple Silicon without worry. I’ll never be buying another copy of Parallels. I’ve had a long history with them since it allowed me to switch to a Mac back in the day, and I started with what I believe was the first release (I bought an iMac in November 2006).
I didn’t see anything on the Parallels website one way or another, but I did see this, “It’s possible to create macOS Monterey 12 and newer virtual machines only.”
You can’t virtualize any Intel machine (Mac or Windows or Linux for that matter) on an Apple Silicon Mac. You can virtualize ARM machines (Mac or Windows or Linux) on an Apple Silicon Mac. Both Mac and Windows ARM machines can emulate Intel so you can run Intel Mac applications on a Apple Silicon Mac virtual machine or Intel Windows applications on am ARM Windows virtual machine.
I think I’ve got that right. The real bottom line is to keep an Intel Mac around for best results if you have Intel software to run in a VM.
I use Parallels to play PC games. Every time Parallels releases a new version, they hype all the great improvements like “your emulator will run 1,000% faster!” (I’m exaggerating)
It does seem that over the years (I’ve been using it since about 2013) it’s speed has increased, but I never notice any change with a new update.
One thing I did notice, however, is that this version is compatible with Mac OS Sonoma. I wouldn’t consider putting the Sonoma beta on my Studio because I don’t want to screw up my game playing, but now … And MacSparky announced he now has Sonoma on his production machine, so it’s getting very tempting indeed.
I’ve used Parallels for 17 years. If the new versions offered the performance improvements they’ve promised in each release, the VM would run far faster than the native machine!
As I posted earlier, I’ve gotten off of that merry-go-round. But when I was on it I would buy every other version – each version seemed to be good for the current macOS as well as the next one, so an update every other year was all I ever needed.
Sorry for resurrecting an older thread, but on the topic of Parallels, does anyone know if there is a performance improvement when using a more powerful Apple Silicon Mac? For example, does Windows 11 on Parallels run noticeably better on a M2 Pro or Max chip as opposed to a plain M2 in a MBA?
I think that will depend on how many cores you dedicate to your VM(s) and what the workloads you’re running in them will be able to do with them. For work that’s limited largely by single threaded performance, the difference between using an M2, M2 Pro, or M2 Max will be negligable.
Do you remember how you got the free upgrade? I purchased PD 18 2 months ago , and I’m not to upgrading to Sonoma since there are known issues with it and PD 18. The
Parallels support doc says that upgrading to PD 19 fixes the issues.
I’m not a frequent Parallels user. There are a few times a year where I need it to access Windows apps, though.
I have tries VMWare fusion and UT(M?) on my M1 mac, but both of those feel short of Parallels’ features.
