The IT Nerd

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am a long time user of Parallels Desktop For Mac. Last year’s update to be frank underwhelmed me. But that strangely didn’t stop me from plunking down my cash to update to Version 13 which is shipping now.

One thing that this update does is introduce support for the touch bar which comes on the new MacBook Pros. I don’t have a touch bar Mac, so I borrowed one to see what it brings to the table. From what I can tell, it does two things:

• You can now display a number of tools and features from within Windows virtual machines via the touch bar. You can also have a duplicate of the Windows Task Bar, plus you can display icons for pinned items such as Cortana or the File Explorer.
• You can use the Touch Bar to control Windows apps inside Windows VMs. There’s a few predefined setups for Office apps, Cortana, and a few other apps and the tools are there to build your own for whatever app you have.

Other improvements include support for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 which worked fine on the MacBook Pro that I tested on, as well as a Picture-In-Picture mode which allows you to view live previews of multiple VMs running onscreen simultaneously. That was kind of cool to try out. When the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update ships in a month or so, it will also support viewing contact info from the People Bar in the Macs Dock as I found out when I fired up a preview build to test with.

Parallels Desktop introduced a bundled suite of Mac utilities called Parallels Toolbox last year. This year there’s a Windows version as well. Some  tools that stood out included Airplane Mode, Clean Drive, and Find Duplicates. All of them do what they imply and are welcome on my Mac.

Owners of a Mac with a Retina display can either render the guest VM at full Retina resolution and rely on the guest operating system’s own scaling, or they can use a “scaled” mode, which presents a lower resolution to the guest VM and then rely’s on the host operating system to scale the image to a usable size. I tend to choose the latter myself because I find that to be far more useful, but it’s nice to have the ability to do either.

Finally, it is fully qualified for MacOS High Sierra which will ship from Apple sometime this month.

But let’s be honest, performance is what you care about. In other words, is this version of Parallels Desktop faster than last year’s version? The performance improvements will not blow you out of the water. But they do exist. While my VM’s don’t run any faster than they did before, they did start up a touch faster, the creation of snapshots was a touch faster, and using storage over USB (such as an external hard drive) was a touch faster.

So, should you drop $50 to upgrade or $80 for a brand new copy? The changes are incremental, not Earth shattering, but for the most part will be welcomed by most users. I say that if you need virtualization software, you should feel free to shell out the cash for this latest iteration of Parallels Desktop For Mac.

This entry was posted on September 1, 2017 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Products with tags Parallels Desktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.