Parallels 11: congrats to engineers (only)

I've been quite ticked off by the recent changes to a subscription model for Parallels 11, but in the last week I've made (temporary) peace with it and upgraded to the subscription Pro ... for a year. I've done this by mentally separating Parallels into engineering, sales & support staff, and blaming sales for the recent wrong turn. Fair's fair: the PD engineers have done a champion job, even while the sales people are ruining the brand by creating perceptions of greed, sly tactics and sharp business practices.

I've had to spend some time recently wrestling with Windows 8.1 VMs on a 12-inch Macbook, one from a Boot Camp install. Unfortunately the latter doesn't work at all in Parallels 10 due to the new SSDs, but this was fixed in PD 11. Much of my annoyance with support here was due to the fact that a) the fix was never announced, and b) it hasn't been ported back to PD 10, and there's no sign that it will be. Again, that's just shitty. The Macbook came out in April, just half-way through PD 10's first year. This meant it had to be PD 11 or nothing for me, and Pro because of some features like CLI support that I really need and that are now missing from the standard version.

So of course I went for VMWare's Fusion 8 instead ... which installed fine but really is just so far behind PD that it's not even funny. In graphics & CPU performance, SSD read/write, battery life, heat and general usability Fusion 8 was merely adequate, but actually quite a chore to use after a while. So I gritted my teeth and installed PD 11. Night and day difference. PD 11 really is a marvel of engineering, and the PD engineers obviously understand the subtleties of VM optimization on OS X (El Capitan GM in my case) far beyond VMWare - who are still struggling to implement DX10 on all but the top-end Macs, three years after Parallels introduced it. PD 11 is super fast, runs very smoothly, sips power and doesn't overheat (with Windows 8.1 anyway). As the 12-inch Macbook doesn't have fans, this is important. Actually it's hard to see much difference in performance between a Macbook (Core M) and Macbook Pro (i5) with PD running something like Office 2013. That's quite an achievement.

So for now I'm willing to give credit where it's due by celebrating the achievements of the PD engineers with this release while bemoaning the direction that sales managers have taken the company (to my mind!). I'm willing to give it a year ... waiting for the company to change its tune, and if not then this time next year I'll just write Parallels off for good and move on, even if that means ultimately accepting an inferior product.

 

sadly I think I'm in much the same boat.

I hate buying a license that I fundamentally object to as it just encourages the company to continue to crap on it's customers, but that software really is good and the alternatives are frustrating in many ways.

That said, so far I'm resisting though and telling my company to switch to VMware fusion (which they've done). If I don't vote with my dollars, there's no reason to think that their sales department will every change.