
Parallels Desktop for Mac Running on Mac with Apple Silicon - theBashShell
https://www.parallels.com/blogs/apple-silicon-wwdc/
======
johnklos
Parallels really tries to constantly force people to upgrade every time
there's a new version.

They even pushed disfunction back to older versions - VMs which previously
started unattended would be hung up with a "sales" window touting a new
version, the VMs themselves wouldn't start, and Parallels had no way to fix
the "issue" aside from the same bullshit we'd expect from outsourced IT ("Try
uninstalling and reinstalling", et cetera).

Upgrades often required reactivating Windows VMs, which is a huge pain in the
ass.

I wouldn't trust Parallels with shit.

~~~
moepstar
Absolutely.

After being extorted for a few years, paying the "Parallels Tax" i'm pretty
keen on never giving them another $...

There's one thing of a company having to pay their employees and another of
basically robbing your customers of what they've paid for (for no technical
reason whatsoever).

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RodgerTheGreat
Many years ago I purchased a retail copy of Parallels. Some time later, the
product began displaying a splash screen on startup featuring ads for an
upsell product. Ads in paid software is unacceptable; I immediately
uninstalled Parallels and vowed to never give the creators money again.

This experience will always be the first thing that comes to mind when I hear
the name "Parallels".

~~~
1123581321
How portable was the Windows VM you were using before you uninstalled it?

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zymhan
The linked post says absolutely nothing of significance.

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kccqzy
What about VMware Fusion? I understand desktop virtualization isn't how VMware
makes money, but still VMware is the 800-pound gorilla in the virtualization
space. I would be very surprised if Apple isn't also working with VMware to
bring their product to Apple Silicon.

~~~
snuxoll
Fusion and Workstation are important ancillary products for VMWare - they are
regularly used as remote admin tools for VMWare server deployments and for
building images that go off to live on both on-prem and public cloud
environments (they are making a big push into getting you to run VMWare on
AWS/Azure/etc. right now).

No chance they aren’t already deep into work on porting VMWare Fusion over as
a result.

EDIT: they are - but I guess it will only support aarch64 guests.

[https://twitter.com/mikeroysoft/status/1275483550985318400?s...](https://twitter.com/mikeroysoft/status/1275483550985318400?s=21)

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thesquib
Does anyone know why virtual machines running on macOS seem so much slower
than the same virtual machines on the same hardware bit running Windows? This
is what I have observed but I have not studied it in any depth. Maybe this
change will improve things?

~~~
rovr138
> Maybe this change will improve things

If you’re talking about running x86 on a VM on Apple’s chips, I doubt it.

You’ll need to emulate the architecture or add a translation layer to map the
instructions from one architecture to another.

------
VWWHFSfQ
Parallels is some of the worst software I've ever had to use.

If you need to run virtual machines on your Mac, then just use VirtualBox.
Trying to run "seamless" windows apps on your Mac OS computer is a totally
shit experience and nightmare.

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whatever1
Sorry for the uninitiated question, but is macOS on ARM only going to support
virtualization of ARM OSes? Does that mean that we cannot get amd64 linux
virtualization on macOS anymore?

~~~
banana_giraffe
Both Parallels and Apple are refusing to answer this question. I suspect the
answer is "only x86-32 bit virtualization works, but we're cracking the whip
on our devs to make x86-64 bit work too"

Honestly though, I have no clue, I just know it's odd they're being so cagey.

My question is how good is the GPU emulation? That can really make or break
GUI stuff.

~~~
snuxoll
Apple just killed off x86 support in 10.15 - likely as a precursor for this
exact transition. I will be shocked if you can’t run x64 VMs as a result.

Welp - guess it’s aarch64 only.
[https://twitter.com/mikeroysoft/status/1275483550985318400?s...](https://twitter.com/mikeroysoft/status/1275483550985318400?s=21)

------
guidedlight
I believe the concern is around Windows x64 virtualization, not presumably
Linux ARM virtualization.

~~~
ogre_codes
> I believe the concern is around Windows x64 virtualization

Linux support is likely much more important to Mac users, likely by a large
margin. Not necessarily Linux ARM virtualization, but Linux on x86 for web
developers working with Docker or Linux VMs. Nobody likes playing guessing
games about whether their local setup is close enough to their production
environment.

~~~
mrpippy
> Linux support is likely much more important to Mac users, likely by a large
> margin

I very much doubt that. Maybe for the HN crowd of web developers, but for
normal users, embedded/desktop developers, basically everyone else, Windows is
more important.

~~~
ogre_codes
> but for normal users, embedded/desktop developers

I hate to break it to you, but web developers outnumber embedded/ desktop
users about 5 : 1 or more, particularly now that a huge chunk of desktop
software has turned into glorified web apps.

~~~
mrpippy
Agreed. “Normal users” as a group far outnumber both though.

~~~
ogre_codes
How many people run Parallels outside of development circles?

Most users are barely capable of running one computer, let alone a virtual
environment with a whole second OS on top. People who rely on Windows software
generally run Windows.

~~~
dogma1138
Nearly anyone with a corporate issued Mac...

And in fact probably far more corporate users run Parallels/Fusion than
developers as there are far far more corporate dependencies on Windows and
older Mac OSes if MacOS was always an integral part of your business pipeline
than there are developers.

Bespoke business software, accounting software, control software and most
importantly legacy software people are still running Macromedia software and
even older things to be able to pull out and open legacy projects.

Sorry to break it to you but just like Linux for desktops - Linux
virtualization for Mac is a rounding error.

You also seem to not understand how people actually use parallels or fusion
they aren’t running or managing guests directly, those are packaged and
presented as apps by their IT department.

Half if not more of the apps on our Corp App Store for MacOS are packaged like
that.

When Jane from accounting opens her managed Mac and clicks on Sage Book 2005
or some 20 years old bespoke Oracle Forms application she doesn’t know it runs
in a VM likely under Windows and quite possibly even Windows XP.

I think you view is really detached from reality since you seem to not know
how most businesses run and managed their endpoints.

There is a whole industry of abstracting “having to manage their computer” not
because most people aren’t capable of doing that but because they weren’t
trained to do so and even if they were/are it’s a complete waste of time and
resources for them to do so.

~~~
ogre_codes
> Nearly anyone with a corporate issued Mac.

Nope. Worked corporate and the only Mac users with Parallels were devs, and
only those who worked on cross platform software.

> Linux virtualization for Mac is a rounding error.

Also, nope. Docker and Kubernetes both run atop VMs and Docker adoption is
quite large in web development.

> When Jane from accounting opens her managed Mac and clicks on Sage Book 2005
> or some 20 years old bespoke Oracle Forms application she doesn’t know it
> runs in a VM likely under Windows and quite possibly even Windows XP.

I'm sure there are some businesses that run that way, but again, I just
escaped corporate life. The folks who had to run Windows apps were just given
Windows computers. I'm sure there are some companies where everyone has the
option and they run virtualization as you suggest, but I haven't seen any
evidence it's anywhere near as ubiquitous in corporations as you suggest.

------
Vomzor
I hope Apple silicon will be fast enough to emulate x86-64 at decent speeds.
Would be nice to be able to keep using 3DS Max on macOS.

~~~
jagged-chisel
I'm curious about the adoption of Apple Silicon at Autodesk. I would hope
they'd be onboard with recompiling their flagship products.

However, if you want to keep an older license without upgrading, I think
Rosetta 2 is going to attempt to translate to ARM and cache that translation,
which should provide reasonable execution speed. Surely, though, when it has
to fall back to emulation, performance is gonna feel pretty bad. That's my
expectation.

~~~
VWWHFSfQ
> recompiling their flagship products

Do people really think it's just a matter of "recompiling" their software?
Autodesk, Photoshop, etc. have decades of code that has been hand-optimized
for x86 ASM. They're not just going to "recompile" the code to run on Apple's
ARM chips. At best they're going to ship something that runs in a dog-slow
virtualization layer.

~~~
tpetry
Very often you have a basic c implementation for every asm optimized code
block. So in this case they simply ditch all the implementations and compile
to arm the c implementation and will start adding arm optimizations.

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sys_64738
How useful is ARM Linux virtualisation nowadays? If you use Docker then are
the ARM variations as mature as alpine based Dockers containers? Can you
really deploy to x86 with just ARM Docker testing? If not then what utility do
you gain here?

~~~
mcspiff
You could just deploy to ARM too:
[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/)

~~~
sys_64738
Wishful thinking for most businesses.

------
johnwheeler
This is not a solution to getting Mac binaries compiled for intel to work with
apple processors is it? Do the apple processors not have the same instruction
set?

~~~
ogre_codes
If you are trying to run 64 bit Mac binaries on the next generation Mac,
that's not Paralllels, that's Rosetta which is built into the next version of
MacOS.

Parallels lets you run an operating system on top of your operating system.
But based on Apple's docs, it won't support emulating Intel CPUs well enough
to run an x86 virtual machine, it will only run operating systems which run on
ARM.

~~~
rovr138
> But based on Apple's docs, it won't support emulating Intel CPUs well enough
> to run an x86 virtual machine, it will only run operating systems which run
> on ARM.

And that’s the big thing a lot aren’t understanding.

~~~
awinder
Charitably a lot of people (or at least me) are trying to understand how to
square that reality with Apple hand leaving that they’re going to “take care
of that audience”. I’m starting to worry this is take care of in The Godfather
sense of the term.

~~~
rovr138
It’s possible to do, don’t get me wrong. For example, QEMU[0] does hardware
virtualization.

Having said that, performance is not the same.

On the other hand, there are builds of Linux that are ARM. Windows also has
ARM builds[1] and they also have a translation layer to run x86
applications[2]. This is done in software, so there’s a performance hit[3].

[0]: [https://www.qemu.org/](https://www.qemu.org/)

[1]: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/arm/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/)

[2]: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-
on...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on-
arm-x86-emulation)

[3]: [https://www.techspot.com/review/1599-windows-on-arm-
performa...](https://www.techspot.com/review/1599-windows-on-arm-
performance/page2.html) (Other parts are good if you’re looking to get an
overview of how it works and limitations).

------
bfrog
Why is it when parallels is brought up, its always "award winning" whats so
award winning this point about virtual machine software.

------
justaguy88
Will qemu support be available?

~~~
mrpippy
Hopefully, in time. Just needs support added for Hypervisor.framework on ARM.

------
testfoobar
"Apple Silicon" is an odd term. Given Apple's brilliant global PR and
marketing teams, I'm sure they had other candidates for branding their
processor line in PR docs.

Is "Apple Silicon" really the best they could conjure. It is snobbish and
vague. It evokes nothing about power, speed, performance or for that matter
computation in general. It likely originated from the title of apple internal
presentations over the years titled "Transitioning x86 to Apple Silicon."

Who is the term "Apple Silicon" for? For buyers of ipads/iphones. They don't
care at all. For buyers of MBA/MBP/iMac/MacPro. Some will care.

A PR/Marcom team got the latest presentation and was tasked with developing
the external messaging. Instead of doing the challenging work of naming the
Apple processor line, they just went with "Apple Silicon".

What would Steve Jobs have done?

The term "Apple Silicon" appears 15 times on this page: "Apple announces Mac
transition to Apple silicon" [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-
announces-mac-t...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-
mac-transition-to-apple-silicon/)

~~~
untog
The term “Apple Silicon” is for very few people, really. How many people who
purchase a MacBook know what “x86” is? Almost none. I suspect Apple don’t want
the name to be all that memorable because they don’t want a large segment of
their customer base to be worried about a big change they barely understand.

~~~
herpderperator
They could just say Apple ARM chips. So the two would be Apple computers with
Intel chips, vs Apple computers with ARM chips.

~~~
olliej
Users definitely don't know what ARM is - they more likely to think
intel==computer than know what ARM is. Look at the iPhone/Pad advertising - it
doesn't mention arm.

Especially given the apple only uses the ISA, not the ARM reference designs.

