“We picked the most popular ,” said Ferrante. As such, select services that you run on the Mac will show up as drives, including Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, and Google Drive.
“We looked at ways to make it more convenient,” said Eugenio Ferrante, Head of Marketing and Sales, and Cross-Platform Applications at Parallels for the Asia Pacific region.ĭemonstrated today, the new version of Parallels can easily send documents from the Mac OS desktop to a Windows version of Office, making it easy to see the formatting of documents or presentations the way they’re supposed to be seen if you have Office for Windows, and not the Mac equivalent.Ĭloud integration is also included, and this has been recognised as one of the more important features.
Fusion 6 also supports - as any app does, with no modifications needed - new OS X Mavericks capabilities such as the options for multimonitor setups that let you put a full-screen app window in its own desktop and use an Apple TV-connected monitor as if it were a monitor attached to your Mac.The first update for Windows 8 will be coming in October called Windows 8.1, while Apple’s update to Mac OS X “Mavericks” is also arriving shortly, and support has been built into the new Parallels for these updates.īut there’s also more coming, with performance increases on the hard disk, web browsing, and 3D graphics side of things, not to mention the application-based features. You can allocate more RAM to each VM (64GB, up from 8GB) and use larger drives (8TB, up from 2TB). VMware Fusion 6: Nothing much new here Most of Fusion 6's enhancements are under the hood. Of the two, Parallels Desktop has the greater number of interesting features ( it did last year as well) - ironically, they're meant to improve Windows 8 by adding a true Start menu and by making it work more like OS X.
You don't need a new version of Parallels or Fusion just because of OS X Mavericks or Windows 8.1.īecause the OS updates are compatible with older versions of the virtualization programs, it becomes even more essential that the upgrade price match the new capabilities' value. Further, OS X Mavericks beta runs both products' previous versions without a hitch.
Although both companies tout "new" Windows 8.1 and OS X Mavericks guest-OS compatibility in their new versions, I ran Windows 8.1 Preview and OS X Mavericks beta just fine in the previous versions. You can run the previous versions - 8 and 5, respectively - in Mavericks, so you don't have to get a new version to maintain compatibility with Apple's latest OS. With the imminent arrival of OS X Mavericks, Parallels has released Parallels Desktop 9 and EMC VMware has released VMware Fusion 6. It's becoming a tax on using Windows on a Mac, and most people I know rarely fire up Windows on their Mac after the first few months of switching, unless their business requires it. Like last year's upgrades, this year's versions fail the value test.
Yet the price remains the same: for Parallels, $50 to upgrade from the previous version, and $80 from any version before that or for new purchases for Fusion, $50 to upgrade from the previous two versions, $60 otherwise. As Apple has sped up the pace of new OS X versions, the Parallels and Fusion upgrades have gotten, well, skimpier, with fewer compelling new features. Every time there's a new version of OS X, there's also a new version of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, the two desktop virtualization products that let you run Windows, Linux, and OS X in virtual machines on your Mac.