After Macworld also Ars Technica publishes a review of Parallels Desktop for Mac. This time the conclusion is:
For all the naysayers and people who may still be unhappy with the transition to Intel chips, it’s hard to ignore the advantage of virtualization, which opens up a broad spectrum of applications and utilities that are no longer crippled by having to run in Virtual PC’s emulated environment.
People pondering the switch to a MacBook can rest assured that with the exception of USB device support and hardware accelerated 3-D applications, their needs will be well met by this little workhorse of a program. Between the networking that just works, the impressive speed and the inability of the client operating systems to know they are running within a “virtual machine,” I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find software for any x86 OS that doesn’t work within a Parallels VM. If you’re still not certain, you can always try the fully-working demo and make your decision later. Just keep in mind that the price tag jumps from US$50 to US$80 after July 15. Until then, you’ll have to send the remaining US$30 to me.
Pros
- Fast and overall responsiveness in OSes is very good
- Clean, unobtrusive interface
- Seamless networking with no configuration needed
- Additional tools for Windows make file sharing and mouse movement better
- Disk image compacting tool saves hard drive space
- Very good application compatibility for software within client OSes
- Runs multiple instances of the application to use more than one core/CPU when running two or more client VMs
- Connect image option is a time and disk saver for downloaded installers
- Well priced, even at US$80
Cons
- Not suitable for games or complex 3-D modeling applications
- Limited USB hardware support
- No option to use more than a single CPU core
- Can’t burn DVDs and CDs within VMs
- Improved mouse movement driver for Windows VMs only
The review is much more complete than the one from Macworld and it’s worth to read.