Parallels Desktop 19 for Mac has been released, bringing some notable new features and performance enhancements to the virtualization software, including password-less Sign-in with Touch ID Integration and full support for Apple's forthcoming macOS Sonoma operating system.
Touch ID on Macs lets users authenticate logins and Apple Pay transactions with their fingerprint, and beginning with Parallels Desktop 19, users with a secure Windows login and password can now use Touch ID to sign in to Windows virtual machines, simplifying the login process.
Parallels Desktop 19 also brings optimized compatibility with macOS Sonoma, including re-engineered Shared Printing via Internet Printing protocol (IPP) that supports printing from Windows apps, with minimal setup required.
In addition, DP 19 promises a richer experience using VMs on Apple silicon Macs, thanks to dynamic resolution adjustments and familiar multitouch gestures with Trackpad support. Meanwhile, Pro Edition users can remotely access a macOS Sonoma 14 VM via port forwarding, which is useful for VMs hosted on Amazon EC2 Mac cloud instances.
The Parallels Desktop software has also been given a design overhaul, with a new app icon and a refreshed UI that aims to make navigation simpler, along with native dialogs for easier interaction with the app.
There are several other improvements highlighted in the release notes for Parallels Desktop 19, including:
- Improved OpenGL support, up to version 4.1, for running more CAD software on Mac, including VariCAD, Deswik.CAD, Vectorworks Vision 2023, and more.
- Improved performance for AcrGIS Pro, a map designing application.
- Compatible to run CentOS 9 Stream on Mac computers with Apple silicon, along with an updated set of ready-to-go Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 22.04.2, Fedora 38, Debian 12, and more.
- New option to create Arm-based Linux VM on Mac computers with Apple silicon using Rosetta to run x86-64 binaries, including containers.
- Enhanced support for the HashiCorp’s Packer and Vagrant with macOS VM on Apple silicon.
- New option to create, group, and manage Parallels VMs and their containers from the Visual Studio Code extension.
- Support for enrolling Windows in Windows management solutions, such as Microsoft Intune and others, when deploying it using Parallels My Account Configuration Profile or as a shared file.
Parallels Desktop 19 for Mac Standard, Pro, and Business editions can be purchased or upgraded to at parallels.com/desktop or from authorized resellers. For more information, including the option to download a free trial, see the Parallels website.
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Top Rated Comments
I also chose a 5K2K monitor with more than one video input so that both Mac and PC can share the same monitor without switching cables. Monitor has built-in hub so that both can share the same keyboard and mouse too. Monitor is an ultra-wide so- if desired- I can split screen to have both Mac and PC on the same screen at the same time. That "feels" very much like Parallels, minus the annual fee.
A modest Mac budget will buy a LOT of PC power and PC key upgrades like RAM and SSD have lots of competition driving down prices and margins so that most of the money one might spend on either is actually buying RAM and SSD... instead of deepening the cash pool in another vault.
Windows 11 is not nearly as bad as Mac fans spin. And all that stuff that we wish Windows emulation could do fully works on an actual PC. Bonus: since PCs are focused on Power instead of PPW, some things that lean on raw power get done faster on PC. So now I just parse out computing tasks accordingly. Some stuff I used to do on Mac now gets done on PC.
"Think different" works well this way for me. Perhaps for some of you too?
What you have to understand is that running Windows natively on a Intel Mac was trivial because an Intel Mac was really just a PC with an Apple firmware. Apple didn't have anything else to do than make an assistant to setup dual booting, and write a few drivers for Apple-specific peripherals (for Windows XP they also needed BIOS emulation, but later Windows supports EFI booting so that's no longer needed, Windows 7 and above can boot 100% natively).
The ARM architecture doesn't work like that, any given vendor's system is very different because there's no equivalent to the PC standard in the ARM world, so the OS needs to be specifically customized to run on a given system.
ARM Windows can be virtualized on a ARM Mac because the VM can reproduce an ARM machine that Windows already supports. To run natively, Windows would need to specifically support Macs.
Unless Apple actively cooperates with Microsoft to make ARM Windows compatible with Macs, you'll never see Windows running natively on a ARM Mac.