I noticed that the pricing for PDM has changed from $49.99 to $79.99 with inclusion of Compactor. While I understand the need for the price increase with the consolidation of two products, it's entirely possible that some people may not want/need the added feature. The price increase of 30 bucks may ward off lots of potential buyers once the pre-release discount is gone. So what I'm saying is, maybe when this hits GA, there could be two versions available, either with or without Compactor, and priced accordingly.
It is still offered for $39.00 if you pre-purchase it. The news of this thing is so widely spread now that anyone who is contemplating buying an Intel Mac should already know to just pre-purchase it now. If they don't use it later they can always sell it on eBay for $69.00. Point is - there's no reason to wait. Save some money now. I bought two. dp
Unless, of course, Appe includes virtualization in OS X 10.5, which seems pretty likely to me. Probably also why Parallels is under the gun to get this out as soon as they possibly can.
I'm really hoping for "virtualization" in the form of an implementation of Win32 by Apple but even with that, there's a lot of use for Parallels... For example, sandbox functionality if you're a developer... I guess you can always run VMWare workstation under Apple's Win32 but Parallels is working (for the most part) now and Leopard is about 6 months away... (And when are we going to see the beta of that? I mean Vista's public beta 2 is due in the next couple of weeks. Are we waiting until WWDC for a 10.5 beta? So I take it that Apple's beta periods is shorter than MS's since Leopard is being released before Vista? But I digress...)
It would be well worth the money. I just compacted my VM from 3.2gb to 1.8gb using the tool. Very cool.
Also, I would guess that a Win32 implementation by Apple is magnitudes more complex than writing hardware drivers for XP for Bootcamp. There are still many issues with Bootcamp. Do you think we'll see a Win32 implemenation ready for 10.5? I mean Robert Cringley said he heard from his best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors say that they'd seen first hand of Windows programs running natively in OSX. Plus the CEO of Adobe kinda let it slip in this one interview, too. Siempre hay esperanza...
That was not the point. Of course I can save money with pre-order. Of course most of the current Intel Mac owners heard about this. But what of the future and potential customers who gets to know about it after GA? And it's entirely possible these guys may have heard about the $40 pre-order price / the original $50 price before finding out the price was raised to $80 eventually. That might be a downer, I'm saying. Aaaand... the compacting engine never seems to work on my VMs. It ALWAYS fails mid-way, with the hard disk image file growing by about 200MB. Perhaps this is due to the intentionally-small swap file size I chose (256MB)? Cuz while the compacting is underway an error once popped up about saying that the virtual memory size is too small. I've posted a thread about this before but I never heard anything from Parallels.
A virtualization solution from Apple is not likely at all. Apple has gone on record stating that they won't do virtualization. They don't want to encourage people to live on Windows. The product manager for Boot Camp has a recorded interview available on Apple's website where he states as much. This is what I took away from the interview: The idea is to just use Windows to do those things that absolutely require a PC until you can live completely on OS X. Since Boot Camp requires a restart, the hassle of doing that will encourage people to try and stay in one OS (ie: Mac OS X)
Parallels knows what they are doing and the price increase is a smart move on their part. I hadn't pre-ordered yet because I was only saving $10 by doing so. I figured I would pre-order when the beta testing looked to be just about over. When I noticed this morning that I would be saving $40, well, I pre-ordered within 3 minutes of seeing the increase. I didn't want them to go GA quickly and I miss out on the savings. $10 wouldn't hurt too much, missing out on $40 of savings would.
same here, quickly forked out my 39.99$ once I saw the new pricing. Just looking for better USB support, otherwise a great product and definitely a steal for that price.
I quite hope that if apple really want to implement virtualization in 10.5, it would be done first at the kernel level: provide some hooks for applications like parallels (or xen if they manage to run on osx...) to run nicely, take the role of some of the current parallels kernel extensions. Such a support can be also useful for coordinate usb devices for example, if osx is aware that it is the prefered host for virtual machines and give devices according to demand. Since apple have full control of the kernel, such a fundamental level implementation will go to quite advanced. And they can call it CoreSystem or something to give it a buzz word. Other solutions such as a linux api layer like what freebsd has or wine for windows games will be also very useful for users of course, but that will be even less conflict with existing virtualization sollution, and seems to be less likely is what the rumor refers.
