It's gotten to the point that I'd rather pay Bill Gates before I pay parallels team again. Yup, it's easier just to bite the bullet and buy a $400 laptop running windows real native then to keep shelling out $50 every year for a fake windows VM.
Wow -- we live in different economic realities. Maybe because I own my own business, I have a different (dare I say 'practical') mindset here in that paying $50 for an upgrade to run multiple OSen on the latest Mac OS (not even released yet) seems reasonable to support the continuing development of this tool. It's not even the price of taking my family out for dinner at OutBack or Olive Garden. It doesn't require that I buy additional hardware.
But some would rather spend $400 to avoid spending $50. The utility of a VM -- one I can explore changing or even risking infection that is essentially disposable and rebuildable in a matter of a few minutes by duplicating a backup copy -- and a system that allows me to run how many different Microsoft or Linux versions on the same Mac laptop -- all of that for $50 seems pretty minor to me. This isn't Adobe, charging four figures for essentially the same bloated crap year after year. This isn't some 'cloud computing' model that will have you renting the software forever more, binding you forever to the enslavement of Adobe CC, Microsoft 365, Mint or similar shackles. And unless you MUST move to Yosemite, this isn't even a required update for functionality. I could see closeted fanboi folks getting their panties in a wad if Parallels is simply a toy for occasional showing off to geeky friends. Nothing wrong with that, BTW - but at the same time not reason to bash a continually developed project evolution. Just stay where you're at and P9 will service you just peachy. Or be brave and buy a $50 external 1Tb drive, clone your entire Mac over to it with CCC, and boot up in that environment when you need to use your older OS and working Parallels install. You spend $50 either way, and you can have both worlds without feeding what you perceive as greedy developers out to get you.
Or you can buy the cheap (in so many ways) win laptop. Not sure how spending that extra $350 will get you working on a Mac at the same time you are using that Windows environment, unless you relish carrying two pieces of hardware everywhere. Yep, that seems practical - not. And how well will that Windows laptop run Win7 or XP at the same time it's running 8.1? Enough snarky from me -- others have your financial model and I have mine. My business makes decisions based on real returns for the tools I buy. $50 isn't going to be painful to any real developer here that must dev in Yosemite. Those individuals will roll that cost into the fluff of any one given project, a cost of doing business. If you are a high school student working minimum wage, it's a day's wages to 'play' with a cool new toy, or purchase four new CDs of music, or a tank of gas that'll take you and some friends cruising or the mall. One wonders about the rest of the posters and posers here -- I suspect if $50 is such a painful hurdle to continue to work, those fussing folks don't have a viable business model for that much longer anyway. Perhaps they should run for political office where rationality gave way to hysterical whining so many years ago.
PS: Mr. Gates hasn't been part of the Windows dev cycle, with the forced need to upgrade your cheap laptop every two years, for quite a while. Heck, we can't even make Ballmer jokes anymore. What has the world come to?