VM not built into Leopard

A number of speculations have been flying around saying Parallels was released in a rush to beat Steve's announcement that virtualization would be built into Leopard. According to the keynote this morning, there's no built-in support for virtualization. Steve did mention Boot Camp being built into Leopard, and saying that if you want to run Windows there are three ways - Boot Camp, Parallels, and VMWare. A slide showed each one running (Parallels was running in Coherence mode.)

My opinion is that now people who were unfamiliar with Parallels are going to seek it out, and download 3.0 - and be disappointed. The marketing wonks really need to re-evaluate what they have said, and change the spin. I have always said, PEOPLE DON'T READ. They see what they want to see and smack the Download Free Trial button. They will get as far as the "play today's hottest 3D games" and rush to install Parallels.

My suggestion? Put 2.5 back up as the "released, stable" version. Change 3.0 to a "preview beta." At least with a disclaimer that it's not ready for prime time, people don't get something they didn't expect.

Oh, and to the guy who was so sure he would be playing Command and Conquer 3 - one of the other announcements was that EA is getting back on the Mac games bandwagon. C&C3 was one of the titles announced as coming to Mac (July I think.)

-Z

 

While I agree with most of your comments, I believe most people will be happy with Parallels. Just the fact that you can run Windows and various Windows apps without having to purchase the Mac verison will satisfy many people. I use Parallels to run XP and connect to work via VPN and run other various apps. I honestly have not had a single problem with Parallels or the latest build. I havent dared to installed any 3D games yet (shhhh, I have a PC for that).

 

Actually there is big news for those wanting to run Boot Camp but not wanting to wait for the whole restart:

New, faster restarts.

Leopard brings a quicker way to switch between Mac OS X and Windows: Just choose the new Apple menu item Restart in Windows. Your Mac goes into safe sleep so that when you return, youll be right where you were. Its much faster than restarting the computer each time. Likewise, a Restart in Mac OS X menu item in the Boot Camp System Tray in Windows makes for a faster return to Mac OS X. With Windows hibernation enabled, you can pick up where you left off.

 

Holy crap. They took down that information (that i posted above, earlier today)

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/bootcamp.html

WTF?!!?!?!

 

"All features referenced in the Mac OS X Leopard website are subject to change."

LOL no kidding...

 

10.5 Rapid switch from OS X to Windows ???

10.5 says that it will be able to rapidly suspend OS X to switch to a suspended boot camp image.

How is this going to work with Parallels using Boot Camp?
Will Parallels prevent running a suspended Boot Camp image?

 

Starting Windows from a saved state does not save me all that much time on my work laptop. All the networking and VPN stuff has to reset itself each time. Yes, it is faster, but not ALL that faster and NOTHING like coherence where if you want to run a program you just launch it. Changing Boot Camp that way (if it even makes the final Leopard feature set) will mean launching XP on my iMac takes 45 seconds vs. the minute and a half it does now (I'm not counting when I first see the desktop, I'm counting when I can actually DO anything productive besides watch my antivirus and anti spyware filters load in).

 

Id guess itd be faster than that, and also if you had both OS partitions living in Flash Memory.... damnnnn

 

Yes people don't read, but that was a pretty damn strong statement without any immediate qualifiers in nearby sentences. I imagined that they've either done something pretty cool or were asking for backlash:

No sign of any qualifiers in that statement. Surely they don't mean only HL2 & Sony Vegas will work. So it's not a stretch to take the statement of "support for 3D graphics" to mean most things will work. Especially when 3D Graphics is listed under the heading "It Just Works!" And the "Feature Matrix" has this to say: "Parallels Desktop for Mac – coming soon — 3.0 includes 3D Accelerator/Direct X 3D Graphics!" Not to mention their front page shows a news article that simply says: "Open GL and DirectX is supported". With multiple links on the front page that go directly to buy, it's easy to see why people would get excited & overlook the easily overlooked caveat.

The Parallels Team knew that people were itching... were begging for 3D support. Even look at the YouTube video.. reminiscent of the CrossOver video where many people drooled over the HL2 (coincidentally mentioned above) video. They were/are losing to their competition in this very important area.

Also, applications that are released as stable (unless it's a game) are usually tested enough that it wont seriously degrade the performance for a significant % of userbase. So removing the 3D "feature" that isn't really there, how many people really wanted to pay a $40 upgrade for "SmartSelect"?

Issues like the current backlash seem to happen often when small companies grow up. When you're nobody, people take everything with a grain of salt... when you're a big company you have to be prepared to defend everything you say. One thing's for sure, there is no excuse for it to happen again.

-Me

 

I think another reason why 3.0 was rushed out the door was fusion.
I myself am comparing fusion with parallels. While I did not rush out to install 3.0 for work reasons (I'm in the middle of implementing server upgrades and didn't dare touch the environment that I used to vpn into work) I'm now Relieved that I avoided that.

2.5 while not completely stable seems to be far better then 3.0

As for 3.0 I think parallels seeing what vmware is doing (even though its still in beta) and rush it out the door to beat them to the punch. This may ultimatly backfire as people tired of the over promising/under delivering and not having a stable product may seek out vmware.

 

There was no need to rush 3.0 out to beat Beta 4. Coherence is still better than Unity in most regards. The interweaving of windows (and therefore Expose) is a nice addition, as is the smoother screen redraws when moving windows around. But Coherence has been out for a while, and VMware is just now trying to get it out.

PD 2.5 > Fusion Beta 4.

Wish I could say the same about the current 3.0.

Posts from Andrew as well as a couple PMs I have received suggest that fixes will be coming soon. I'm hoping they start releasing some updated builds even if they don't fix everything in one release. I'll take some fixes.

 

To be honest I don't like either feature (coherence or unity) I prefer to have a vm window and have all of my ms windows there. Also having a windows program change my file assocations so it opens a file instead of my osx counterpart seems risky and not a feature I want.

I use windows for work and I like to keep that segregated