So you have to pay $99 a year to host one virtual machine instance? If the guest is windows 11 pro, you also have to purchase a license from Microsoft? It sounds more like it should be $99 a month for a *remote* virtual machine. Microsoft Azure offers bare metal servers for which to host a virtual machine plus you pay for the license also. But with parallels you provide the resources? What happens if you have more than 22 cores for which to host your virtual machine?
Good luck getting a Windows 10/11 VM that is as performant as a local one for $99/yr. Last time I checked a 2vcpu 8gb Windows365 Remote worker VM was like $35/mo. Even with <20ms latency it's an inferior experience to a Win11 VM in PRL. VMware charges money ($200) for their hypervisor. Windows effectively costs $0 unless you are an enterprise customer. I do understand a little bit of your frustration, In linux there is usually a powerful free alternative that just requires some extra time and learning, but in apple world you just build your product on FOSS then slam the door on the community. You can see a lot of evidence that parallels pulls heavily from virtio and open-vm-tools Even though I don't really use it much, coherence (unity) is a compelling feature, and there's other little things that add value. I have actually never had a GUI VM feel as "native" as Parallels, I got close with a heavily modified vmx file in VMware workstation
