djames4242

sflocal said:

I’ve never used Parallels as I’ve been a loyal VMWare Fusion user.  Now though, I wouldn’t touch Parallels with a mile-long stick.  Usually companies like these don’t last long when private equity firms get involved like they’re doing here.

I’ve been using Parallels since v3, well before Fusion was released. When Fusion came out I gave it a shot, but it caused frequent kernel panics when using VMs stored on external media.

A few years later, with 2-3 Macs I use regularly, I tried Fusion 7 because VMWare has a much more liberal license policy (that is, one license can be installed on up to three Macs, while Parallels requires a license for each, even when only one is in use at a time). I hated how it treats multiple displays - when using multiple displays on a guest, it does not allow you to switch those displays independently. I frequently will have one display showing a guest OS while the other displays my host OS windows and I switch back and forth. Parallels allows this. Fusion does not. If you swipe one display’s space, the other display switches as well. This is a show stopper and is not even a selectable option. From what I can tell, this still exists in current versions of Fusion.

For this reason alone I pay for two Parallels licenses rather than a single Fusion license.

matrix077 said:

Is this because of security reason? I can’t think of any other.

More likely because it never worked reliably.

SnickersMagoo said:

iTunes should check out Roon! It's what iTunes should have been 5-10 years ago....It's the most incredible playback software ever made.....iTunes could not carry Roon's Jock strap!

It looks pretty, but that's not enough to get me to pony up $120/year, unless it comes with some must-have features, and I didn't see anything particularly compelling on their site, but maybe I'm missing something.

I have one of its bigger brothers (The 918+) and absolutely love it. I have several services running on it inside Docker containers, plus a dedicated MySQL server and Apache web server running. I also moved my Plex Server from running on my iMac over to the NAS so that my Mac doesn't need to be on all the time. I've got 3x8tb WD Red drives now and will add a fourth soon. Even though the drives themselves are not fast, I never ever feel that the performance is subpar.

Now that Dropbox has upped their monthly charge to $12, I'm also looking at replacing its functionality. Synology Drive gives me the same features as the Dropbox client including offline file access and syncing. For the critical documents I want to keep an offsite backup of, I plan on using S3 or S3-IA which should lower my monthly cost to roughly $2/month.

With all this, there's still so much capability I could be using.

When my wife needed her own computer earlier this year, I tried to convince her to get another Mac. She bought one of the older 2009 MacBooks and never figured out how to use it, so she decided to stick with what she knows (because, work) and opted for a Surface Pro. I agree with this article that it's a really, really nice piece of hardware. She also likes that she can detach the keyboard and use the tablet for watching videos when she travels.

I personally don't care for Windows and, unless Apple really screws up down the road, will never own any Microsoft products myself. However, for those who want Windows, the Surface line is really nice.