Parallels 3.0

The internet commerce company that is handling all the online orders is, well, an INTERNET COMMERCE company. Pre-authorization is a pretty standard anti-fraud tool for an internet commerce company. In a few days Parallels is going to be releasing some thousands of version 3 keys, and they want to make sure a good chunk of them are not getting stolen.

 

The latest e-mail from Parallels says "Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac is less than a week away from its official release." This means version 3.0 is being released on the day WWDC 2007 starts.

 

no thank you (for now at least)

After receiving the e-mails about pre-purchasing the upgrade at a special price we discussed for a while to upgrade our 10 licenses but in the end we decided that $10 dollars is not worth the risk of putting it into a blind hole (even the Vole releases public betas and release candidates of their software).

In the earlier releases the point releases were made available for testing to anyone interested.
For some reason this was now moved to a closed circle. This would have still been ok if at some point parallels would have released at least a public beta (and maybe even release candidate) to get an idea how this new version performs.

We had that chance last time and the process helped us to determine that the 3188 and betas before that were causing all sort of havoc on the Macs we had them installed and helped us to go back and run the 1970 build rock solid on all the machines.

So, even though we don't like throwing money out the window we will just have to sit tight and wait on the first couple of reports on how the new version works and possibly try a trial version before we even upgrade a single installation.

Promising us 'kewl' features is one thing, but if it comes at the cost of stability then we'd rather pass on those.

Hopefully for the next releases Parallels will rethink their strategy on the deployment cycle.

 

There was talk of it being released on or around today - Wish Parallels would just say when it's being released.

 

I hope they keep the current beta policy of closed betas. I'm not a beta tester, but there has a been a noticeable improvement in the support forums. And for those that want to test the beta's, all they have to do is complete a simple form.

 

Not all who submit the form are allowed to be beta testers. Either that, or Parallels misplaced my application somewhere...

 

You might want to rethink your own, as well. You have an opportunity that ends today to save $100 on your upgrades. What you get for you money is version 3.0 of Parallels and all upgrades from 3.0 to 3.x. Certainly there will be problems in 3.0 and some will be fixed in 3.1, 3.2, etc. Those will be free fixes, and you will have $100 in the bank. That, btw, is just about enough to buy two new licenses at the upgrade price. Or dinner out for two.

Unless you migrate away from Parallels you will be going to 3.x at some point. If it doesn't work out for you, you can request a full refund. Why not save some coin and do it now?

 

Thank you.

Unless 3.0 is much more stable and causes less slowdowns of the Macs than build 3188 we will most likely be staying with build 1970. We have no use for the 3D portion of version 3.0. One user might upgrade as he uses Linux as a guest and if the parallels tools for linux prove to be worth it we will go for it for his installation after we test it once it is released.

Paying blindly for something and then having to fight for a possible refund is not in our strategy. I am happy for anyone who is comfortable with that.

We have now started to test the competing product on one machine and on release, depending on the stability and machine impact, we might switch altogether. Otherwise we will wait for version 4.0 and re-evaluate the situation at that time.

 

Yeah, don't get me started on the VPC 6 to 7 upgrade. No price break WHATSOEVER. It was about $180 to upgrade 3 to 4 months after I upgraded to version 6.

I fully understand Virtulization is far easier to do than complete emulation, but good lord I remember when everyone thought VPC (and do you remember SoftWindows?) were just the coolest things.

No one here is being forced to upgrade. 2.5 will continue to work. If you want the features of 3.0, buy the upgrade, if not, continue running 2.5.3188. My one complaint is that there are a lot of bugs fixed in 3.0 which exist in 2.5 and it does seem wrong to charge for the bug fixes, but there is no way to get the bug fixes without getting the new features. I tanked my car on Monday, it cost me $64, Parallels is offering an upgrade for $40 or $50 (I can't recall as I am part of the free upgrade program).

 

Would you prefer they say it will be released June 7, and have them push out a release even if it is not ready for the general public? Or would you prefer they get a RC out that is relatively bug free and just say the release will be in the next couple to few weeks?

There are reasons they haven't pushed out version 3.0 yet.

 

It would be nice to know if they plan on waiting until WWDC? Any day now pending any show-stoppers? Couple of weeks? Now that we're giving our credit cards up even a vague timeline would be nice.

I always think about those poor ModBook buyers from February who pre-ordered but are STILL waiting (now until the end of June) to get their "Mac Tablet."

Uncertainty makes people uneasy. We've heard any day now and and weeks. Which is it?

 

1. Dual Core support.

Both 2.5 (Build 3188) and upcoming 3.0 version are exposing only 1 core for guest OS inside virtual machine. From my point of view it is very reasonable setup for dual core system because it leads to perfect balance between guest OS running on one core and Mac OS X running on another.

We are working on virtual SMP support (possibility to expose 2 cores for guest OS) and this feature will be part of upcoming free updates for 3.0 later this year. But I think this feature will be usefull only for 4 and 8 core Mac Pros, not for dual core systems.

2. Intel Virtualization.

Intel VT-x is already fully supported in version 2.5. There are some minor changes and improvements in 3.0, but until Intel not come with some new features like VT-d and EPT we are not going to make any significant changes here.

 

I'm not really interested in 3D graphics and more integration of Windows with Mac OS X. In fact I prefer to have the two isolated from each other as much as possible so the new features of version 3.0 do not mean much to me. However, I am very interested in bug fixes.

You say that there are a lot of bugs that were fixed so I'm assuming that you were involved with the Beta testing of 3.0. Is there a list of what has been fixed in version 3.0?

I would consider upgrading from 2.5.3188 to obtain these fixes but not at the expense of having to deal with a new set of bugs because of the added features.

 

In that case maybe you'll be interested in multiple snapshots, undo disks, splitted disks, security levels, improved memory manager, Vista Boot Camp, direct printing and so on?

 

I just want to know when I can expect to see it. Hours? Days? Weeks?

I realize the nature of "say one thing and it will all change tomorrow" when it comes to software development. But you guys wouldn't be pre-ordering if you weren't close, right?

Right?

 

Andrew,

Out of the items that you listed, the only one that I would be interested in is the 'improved memory manager'. Can you elaborate on how memory management has been improved?

 

One of the visible improvements - it doesn't preallocate 1,5G space on your hard disk for memory mapped file.

 

Thanks for providing that insight into the memory management. I'm assuming then that the disk space will be dynamically allocated based upon actual requirements as opposed to allocating the maximum that could possibly be needed.

 

3.0 out this Friday.

On my invoice (2 Dollars too high) it says "Delivery date: latest 8 june 2007". That means this coming Friday!

 

Just to add to the rumors, I got an e-mail this morning from Parallels saying that 3.0 is less than a week away.

So Friday is definitely less than a week away.

I think that Parallels probably wants to pump out 3.0 before the WWDC confidence on Monday.

This is total speculation on my part, but I just have a feeling that is something going on with Apple and Parallels.