Filed under: Software, Beta Beat
VMWare pricing announced
VMWare offers the Windows-on-Mac alternative to Boot Camp and Parallels. This week at WWDC, they announced that their product Fusion will be shipping at the end of August 2007 for $79.99US (pre-order pricing is available at $39.99US for a single license). We've written about Fusion several times here at TUAW. VMWare recently released Beta 4 of Fusion, which product manager Pat Lee called the first "feature complete" version, though there may be another beta release before the final product ships in August.
Remember when all we had was Virtual PC? Those were the (agonizing) days, my friends.
[Via Infinite Loop]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tony C said 12:00PM on 6-12-2007
Gah! I just squeaked under the wire and paid $40 for the Parallels 3 upgrade. I'm not going to run out and pay another $40 for the competing product.
Yes, Fusion's little video looked very pretty (especially the window rendering speed and drop shadows), but in reality, on my (2GHz CoreDuo, 2GB RAM) MacBook Pro, it hogs up more CPU time and feels slower than Parallels.
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Rob said 12:41PM on 6-12-2007
Even if you spent $79.99 and $40 on Parallels, $39.99 is worth it for VMware. There is more industry support for VMware and the VM Library is vast while Parallels just started their library.
I bought Parallels during a "free upgrades for a year" promotion last December and Parallels is not honoring it and requiring I pay $40 for a 3.0 license. I am uninstalling Parallels nad telling every single mac user I know to dump Parallels.
VMware may make you pay for major upgrades just like Parallels but at least they won't lie about it.
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Justin said 1:18PM on 6-12-2007
Well, Since I don't need 3d I'm still going to go with VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org/
It is just a beta for MacOS X although it works fine (runs Windows).
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starlabs said 1:28PM on 6-12-2007
FYI for those with MacBooks (Intel GMA950 integrated video):
Parallels 3 does support 3D acceleration.
VMware (currently) does NOT. I could not find any mention of whether they will or won't in the future. I imagine that they eventually will (or should), given that Parallels has proven that it is technically feasible to do this with the 950.
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Rick said 2:21PM on 6-12-2007
@starlabs
You need to read again:
http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/features.html
"Accelerated 3D graphics
* Experimental hardware with accelerated 3D graphics let you run DirectX 8.1 3D savvy applications and play select DirectX 8.1 games in Window XP with Service Pack 2 virtual machines."
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follerec said 2:52PM on 6-12-2007
Rick,
You'll have to read the Release Notes at:
http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/releasenotes_fusion.html#games
"3-D acceleration does not work on Macs that use the Intel GMA 950 graphic chipset."
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Victor Agreda Jr said 4:51PM on 6-12-2007
We've got a video with VMWare that we'll post later-- stay tuned!
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Mark S said 7:12PM on 6-12-2007
I'm totally in on VMWare! But the real question is, when will it be released?
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DaMaDo said 9:30AM on 6-13-2007
I'm using both, but parallels seems to work smoother for me. Parallels runs eve online very smooth which causes a BSOD on VMware. I like the look of the parallels window too. I dunno i'll continue using both, but so far VMware is not friendly to most 3d games yet.
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Sam said 12:12PM on 6-13-2007
@Rob (#2): That's being rather harsh, not to mention a very serious accusation - in the UK it would probably come under mis-selling a product. Have Parallels themselves refused to give you a key, i.e. through direct contact with them, or are you assuming this because you simply haven't gotten your key yet? If you have proof of purchase for the maintenance offer version, *and* Parallels have flat out refused to provide you with a key (which, I must admit, I doubt), you should probably threaten legal action.
Parallels said it could take up to a week to get the keys out for maintenance customers - so I got a trial key for 3.0 when it was released - and I received my full 3.0 key today. I found this reasonable, as trial keys last for 15 days and Parallels promised to have my key to me in less than half that time.
In its current state, I wouldn't recommend Fusion to anyone - even with debugging code turned off it's still far too slow to be useful. I can't attest to its stability because I simply don't have the patience. And while Unity seems more technically advanced, it doesn't want to enable itself on Vista - while Coherence successfully creates enough of an illusion, even on Vista, for it to be good enough for me. Also, remember that you can convert VMware VMs into Parallels machines.
Sure, Parallels can make things a bit sluggish sometimes, after all I am giving over more than half my first-gen MacBook's RAM to it (528MB from less than 1024MB, accounting for video RAM), but Fusion bogs down my whole system in a way I've never seen since I upgraded my RAM to 1gig!
Sam
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