Parallels Desktop 15
Run almost any operating system in a virtual machine.
FROM £5.83/PER MONTH | PARALLELS.COM | NEEDS MACOS 10.12.6 OR LATER
There are now even more good reasons for running a different operating system within a virtualisation environment like Parallels Desktop. You may need access to Windows apps, want to play games unavailable on macOS, or access old apps which can’t run in Catalina.
Parallels 15 is now fully compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina, both as host and running in a VM. Parallels is providing an update with final tweaks to ensure it works fully with Sidecar and Sign in with Apple in the release version of Catalina. You can use Sidecar with an Apple Pencil to interact with Windows 10 in its tablet mode.
It’s hard to find an operating system which Parallels 15 doesn’t support in a virtual machine. Not only that, but no matter what format you present its installer, it turns it into a VM with minimal effort on the part of the user. It can, for instance, migrate your existing Boot Camp partition into a new Windows VM.
Windows VMs offer several options which you can customise to your needs. Coherence mode is ideal if you need to integrate just a few Windows apps with predominantly macOS software, for example. You can tune this, although switching into and out of what are fundamentally Windows apps still takes some getting used to.
Raw processor performance is inevitably as good as the Mac you’re running it on, and the number of cores given to Parallels. Given an iMac Pro with a native Geekbench single core score of 5300, a Parallels VM comes close with 5100. Because your virtual machine is ‘cleaner’ than the host macOS, low-down functions such as writing Signpost entries in the log may be faster in Parallels, taking only 450 nanoseconds in a VM, against a more typical 510ns in the host macOS.
FUN-FILLED POWER
For games and other graphicsintensive apps, version 15 brings major improvements. Not only does virtualisation work much better with Metal-accelerated graphics in the host macOS, but in Mojave and Catalina hosts, Windows DirectX 11 (as well as 9 and 10) works directly with Metal. This lets you run CAD/CAM apps like Autodesk 3ds Max, and games such as Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (although they do need a good host graphics card), and takes full advantage of Retina displays. Version 15 can also run Xbox games in a Windows 10 VM, and supports Xbox and other Bluetooth LE controllers.
Pro and Business users can incorporate Windows VMs into a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) environment, using BitLocker and features such as virtual smart cards.
Parallels Desktop 15 delivers advances that make it better in almost every way than using Boot Camp, and well ahead of competitors, for the moment at least.