With the imminent arrival of OS X Mavericks, Parallels has released Parallels Desktop 9 and EMC VMware has released VMware Fusion 6. It's becoming a tax on using Windows on a Mac, and most people I know rarely fire up Windows on their Mac after the first few months of switching, unless their business requires it.
Like last year's upgrades, this year's versions fail the value test. Yet the price remains the same: for Parallels, $50 to upgrade from the previous version, and $80 from any version before that or for new purchases for Fusion, $50 to upgrade from the previous two versions, $60 otherwise. As Apple has sped up the pace of new OS X versions, the Parallels and Fusion upgrades have gotten, well, skimpier, with fewer compelling new features. Every time there's a new version of OS X, there's also a new version of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, the two desktop virtualization products that let you run Windows, Linux, and OS X in virtual machines on your Mac.
