Parallels Desktop for Mac 16
This upgrade lacks explosive new features, but it’s worth buying to stay in step with Apple’s OS developments
SCORE
PRICE New licence, Home & Student, £58 (£70 inc VAT) from parallels.com
Parallels Desktop has been my go-to virtualisation platform for a while, mostly hosting Windows 10 installations. As you’d expect from a fully featured hypervisor, it allows you to do things that you simply can’t dream of when Windows is installed onto base hardware. Take a snapshot of how everything is just now? No problem: it takes a few seconds. Roll back five minutes to that moment before you installed an unstable app? Not a problem: with a wave of your magic wand, everything is reset. This is especially powerful when you are working with buggy code, such as a wobbly app or driver.
As before, Parallels lets you set up new virtual machines with a few mouse clicks. It even has precooked download and install images for most everything you could want to do. And if you want to take an existing Windows machine, and “suck its brains out” into a new VM, there are tools to do that too. Pull down a Windows 10 environment complete with the Microsoft development tools stack on a free 60-day licence? It takes a few moments. Want to introduce some network delays and packet corruption into your testing environment? No problem: the virtual switch behind Parallels can do that too.
So what’s new in version 16? In truth, nothing too exciting – but that’s what you should expect from what was already a very rounded and polished product. There’s better 3D support for high-end modelling apps, improved storage optimisation and space reclamation. But let’s not get too excited: the problem with virtualisation is that when software really hammers the hardware, you either run out of steam or find that the virtualisation isn’t good enough.
Although things are improved here, running Windows 10 in a hypervisor is never going to be as fast as a raw computer running it natively.
I’m more convinced by the other changes, which improve Parallels’ core competency: that is, running OSes in a contained, safe environment doing normal, day-to-day things. For instance, you can now freeze-dry virtual machines to a fraction of their size if you don’t need them regularly. It also supports all the latest macOS versions, including the forthcoming Big Sur release.
There’s a rewritten engine that does away with third-party kernel extensions (KEXTs) in favour of using the Apple hypervisor engine. That’s important, because KEXTs are being heavily deprecated by Apple as part of its ongoing security push. As an extension to the kernel, KEXTs have total access to the deepest parts of the OS – and hence everything you do. Apple has been developing new interfaces that shield drivers from the OS and hardware, which means that KEXTs are on the way out. Apps, and hardware, that depend on them, will need to update to keep working in the future. Moving to Apple’s hypervisor is one of the biggest changes in this release of Parallels, but it seems to be working well so far.
There are a bunch of other enhancements, including faster load and execution speed. The list goes on and on, as you’d expect from an annual update of a mature product.
“This isn’t a tool for the beginner, but if you have some technical nous, it can allow an entirely new way of working”
What hasn’t changed much is ease of use, but that’s okay: you have to understand what’s going on here, and more advanced features, such as the seamless integration of Windows apps directly and individually onto the Mac desktop, requires understanding. This isn’t a tool for the beginner, but if you have some technical nous, it can allow an entirely new way of working.
The cost? Still £70 for the Home & Student version, but if you’re upgrading then it costs £40. And, to be clear, you really should upgrade: it’s best to keep up to date with both the base OS from Apple and your hypervisor tools. It’s frankly a modern miracle that these things work at all, so keeping up to date is really important here.
The Pro edition, for developers, testers and power users, is £80 per year, and obviously new editions such as version 16 come as part of the subscription. I have it on all of my Macs: for me, a Mac isn’t complete without a hypervisor, and Parallels is my tool of choice. It gives me the best of every platform, on one computer. It’s part of my daily routine, and I can’t imagine working without it.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac with Intel Core 2 Duo minimum 4GB RAM (16GB RAM recommended) 16GB storage space for Windows 10 (SSD recommended) macOS 10.13 and above