12.1 kills ram allocation >8gb for non PRO version?

I've decided to live with what Parallels offered me: one year of the Pro Edition after which I can continue to use the resource-limited Standard Edition. Because I routinely upgrade, the year of Pro Edition will give me the same functionality to which I've become accustomed and require likely until the next version from Parallels and/or the leading competitor. At that time, I can choose the software product that is the best fit for my utilization. One factor in this is that Parallels now prominently advertises the recently implemented limitation of the Standard Edition, which I see as a spark of responsibility. I still think that Parallels should have restored the full functionality that I purchased in the Standard Edition 12 and believe that not doing so is a mistake of customer relations, but I can tolerate this partial provision. That said, my allegiance to Parallels is down to a thread. If I were to purchase anew right now, I would be a customer of the leading competitor because they support more RAM at a lower price point and the performance reviews indicate little if any reason to prefer Parallels for my requirements.
 
Wow, this is such bad business for Parallels. Removing functionality is not the kind of thing you do in a decimal point upgrade - no company should ever decrease functionality with a free, self installing upgrade. It's sneaky, unfair and a lawyer would no doubt have a field day.

What they should have done is wait until Parallels 13 is released, then split things into Standard and Pro edition. They can add more features and make Pro more attractive, and offset the blow of limiting CPUs and RAM . In a free upgrade, to suddenly find that your VMs don't work as before, and to suddenly have less functionality than what you originally paid for is an extremely bad business decision. You can't move the goalposts after purchase...

Please either upgrade my key to restore lost functionality, or provide CLEAR instructions on how to revert to the previous version of Parallels. Pull this trick on a new version 13, which I might or might not upgrade to. For a point upgrade, wow... well, I can only say that I've never seen this behaviour from any other company.
 
I'm in the same boat as many of you. Had Parallels done this right out of the gate at least we wouldn't have been blind-sided.
 
Andrew@Parallels said:
Thanks for adding your viewpoints to this discussion.
For those users, who are concerned about this update limitations, please send me a private message on the forum.
I will be happy to review your use cases, licensing information and follow up 1:1.
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Well I have this crippled version of 12.1 now.. no warning that the upgrade was going to cripple my previous abilities.
How are you going to fix this?
 
Andrew@Parallels said:
Thanks for adding your viewpoints to this discussion.
For those users, who are concerned about this update limitations, please send me a private message on the forum.
I will be happy to review your use cases, licensing information and follow up 1:1.
Click to expand...

Im not able to find the PM option in this forum (see that others cant either..?)

So please contact me. We need to solve the problems you guys just caused when silently changing my license, so I no longer can use more then 8GB in my VM.
 
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Hello,
I have been a Paralells customer for a while, and have been mostly happy with it so far.
This morning i got prompted for an update which I did as usual.
My bad that i didn't read carefully the release notes, because if had known i'd have never clicked that button.
I am using it on an I7 iMac to run Linux VMs and was usually using 8 cores and 12 megs of RAM, because those builds are pretty heavy.
With that new update, now I am limited to 4 cores and 8 gigabytes, which makes this VM useless unless i Subscribe to the Pro Version.
Changing the Core features and capabilities right in the middle of an update is totally unacceptable. To make it clearer this is not what I purchased in the first place when evaluating and making the decision to choose Parallels.
At this point i really feel like i have been fooled, and i regret to have made the v12 purchase to update my old v11.
 
Same thing, here just updated my 12.0 version to 12.1 and figured out i wasn't able to run my usual VMs using 8 cores and 12Gigs RAM.
This is totally unnaceptable from a end user point of view. Wether that limitation didn't make it to the initial 12 release cannot be any excuse for gimping users that evaluated and bought v12 with another set of functionality.
To make it clear, this is simply NOT what i bought in the first place and I am really pissed about Parallels attitude sneaking such an update without any clear notification.
I cannot either contact Andrew via PM (can't find the option), So please PM me.
 
Parallels need to put this right for all users - not just the ones who can PM them.. Come on Parallels do the right thing and remove these restrictions you have introduced !
 
DougP said:
For those of you being offered a Pro licence for a year due to this gross mishandling by Parallels be very careful. As far as I can see from the website you can only get the Pro version as a yearly plan meaning that after one year and a day you have nothing and have to pay full price to take out another Pro annual right to use. The Standard version offers a perpetual licence which you can choose to update, or not.
Click to expand...

Exactly my point!
Pro version is for hire only. No permanent license exists.

DougP said:
I too am planning to move to VM Ware. I have tried running in crippled mode with just 8GB and 4CPUs but my VM just runs too slowly and can not handle the large Excel spreadsheets that I use. (It is also a shame that Excel for Mac doesn't have all of the features of Excel for Windows otherwise I could stop using Windows altogether. )
Click to expand...

I now switched for VMWare Fusion and I'm very happy with it.
MY SQL database is happily running with 32GB virtual memory :)
This is what I found so far:

The negative sides of VMWare:
1) lack of MAPI mail integration
2) 32 bit Linux cannot be installed with 64 bit CPU

But I can live with them since:
1) I found gmail plugin for Windows (tvhgooglemapi) to handle MAPI
2) If I really need to install 32bit Linux, I simply fire up VirtualBox (freeware)

The positive sides of VMWare:
1) 48 Euro price tag for a personal license (i.e., multiple Mac installation allowed)
2) very generos 64GB RAM + 16 CPU limit
3) virtual machine can be run under all other VMWare products for Windows, Linux as well as vSphare hypervisor.

Saying that, the largest reason I decided to walk away from Parallels was lost confidence in their business practice.
I cannot entrust my production environment for the software
which hangs my system and demands a payment during the routine minor version up.
 
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Andrew@Parallels said:
We appreciate you sharing your feedback on the recent update. While the quote above is still actual, let me try to explain what happened in different words. The limitations you started noticing with the recent update were always a part of Parallels Desktop 12 Standard Edition and it was documented in the product guides since version 11 release in August 2015. Unfortunately these limitations didn't come into effect until the latest update, as there was a minor issue in the product which made some of the Pro features available to Standard edition users. With this issue corrected, Standard edition now has standard set of features, and Pro has advanced functionality. Hope this explains what happened and why.
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This is ridiculous. Imagine you bought a car and in the first service your car service station remove the back seats because the car was not intended to drive more than two persons (as stated in the manual on page 100 and 127). If you want your back seats back you can upgrade to the car's Pro version with back seats included. But then you have to buy a new car every year, otherwise the engine is removed too. This is exactly what Parallels does.

You offered a trial version with a specific feature set, the customer purchased the full version and after some time you removed some features with a minor update. This is not very customer friendly, I would call this fraud instead.
 
As far as I am concerned, I'll be waiting for Andrew to PM me as he suggested.

Then I will kindly ask for a licence refund, with which i'll go and buy a VMWare fusion 8.5 Licence that will not have so ridiculous limitations.

There is no way i will pay for 100$ a year, for a few features that i used to have in v12 when i bought it, which are still available in VMWare for the same price as the non Pro Version, and for which i'd have to pay Yearly at Parrallels.

Aside the sneaky introduction of these limitations, which were very badly introduced, this makes the Parallels non pro version not competitive anymore compared to VMWare Fusion 8.5.
 
Andrew@Parallels said:
Thanks for adding your viewpoints to this discussion.
For those users, who are concerned about this update limitations, please send me a private message on the forum.
I will be happy to review your use cases, licensing information and follow up 1:1.
Click to expand...

I have just downgraded do V12.0.2 using Time Machine and it is working fine.
Andrew Couldn't find how to send MP's here, so, please send a MP because I want to know how Parallels is going to proceed on this issue.
 
I just learned of another issue with this forced upgrade to Pro if I want to use the number of cpus I had previously used. If I upgrade to the Pro version to fix this issue, I no longer have the option of buying a 1-time license, I'm forced to buy the annual subscription.
 
I should also mention that I've been using the SAME VM configuration (6 cores, 12gig memory) for the last three versions, all bought at the same price point. So even if this cripple-ware was supposed to have happened from the major upgrade to 12, it's still switching out a crippled version for what used to be a full version, and I refuse to move over to their subscription plan. (I still use CS6, because Adobe pulled the same stunt.)

I used VirtualBox for free before buying a Parallels license; and I can certainly go back to them now.

And, like the others, Andrew@parallels stated that we should PM him 1:1, but I cannot find the link to do so.
 
LongChair,
This exactly what they have done - my company uses a lot of this software and we have a number of users that are now crippled. We have now blocked all further upgrades, and are discussing what further steps we need to do to rectify this situation.

Extremely unhappy with this bait and switch.
 
Yvo said:
Just go back to 12.0.2-41353 and you are fine.
No need to go back to 11 if you already have 12.0.2-41353.
Certainly don't upgrade to the pro version, don't give them a cent!
12.0.2-41353 runs fine.
Click to expand...
I reverted to that release using Time Machine successfully... Still contemplating annulment of my 12.x purchase, so I can use that money to buy VMWARE...
 
BennettB said:
I'm not anywhere near as tech savvy- was it difficult to move the Widows license over?
Click to expand...

Not at all.
There is an import functio in VMWare which let you import Parallels VM quite elegantly.

Just run this command in terminal in your virtual Windows 10 before shut it down normally:
shutdown /s /t 0

To open the command line terminal in Windows 10, type
cmd
in the Cortana/search window.
VMWare offers 30 days free trial version with complete functions. Try it before you buy.

From VMWare help site:
With a retail license, when you buy Windows from a vendor, the license enables you to change platforms as often as you want. In this case, you can reactivate Windows over the Internet, or by phone with Microsoft Support.

[Edited]
Just tested and confirmed that VMs created under Fusion can be opend "as is" in Lynux version of VMWare (Workstation Player).
It is a wonderful news. Now the next time I have any problem on my MacPro, I can continue my Windows project
on the Linux desktop I also have. Funny how the negative action by Parallels brought out a very positive future, at least for me.
 
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