VMWare offers Windows-on-Mac tool at half price

Fusion due in August

By Tony Smith, 11th June 2007

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

VMWare's Windows-on-Mac application, Fusion, will go on sale in August, the virtualisation technology specialist announced today. Order it now and you'll get the software at half price, the company said.

VMWare announced Fusion in August 2006, though a pre-release test version has been available to Mac users for seven months now.

Like Parallels Desktop 3.0 - released just last week - Fusion allows Mac users to run a variety of operating systems within a window on their Mac OS X desktop. Fusion is capable of loading Windows from disk partitions created by Apple's own Windows-on-Mac tool, Boot Camp. It's also capable of running Windows apps with the Windows desktop hidden, as if they were running natively on the Mac.

VMWare also touted Fusion's support for Microsoft's DirectX games API, but we note it's only capable of working with DirectX 8.1 - Parallels Desktop 3.0 supports DirectX 9, making it more relevant for Mac users keen to run Windows games.

VMWare Fusion
VMWare's Fusion: out-performed by Parallels Desktop?

Fusion supports USB 2.0 devices - as does Parallels - and to help PC users switching to a Mac, it can also use virtual machines created from a Windows PC's entire hard drive using VMWare Converter.

VMWare Fusion is due to go on sale in August for $80, though the company is offering the product for $40 if you're willing to order the software before then. More details here.

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

COMMENTS

House Rules Send Corrections

All Reader Comments (5)

Latest Comments

Posted Tuesday 12th June 2007 00:19 GMT

Kammy

Uh...

Parallels 3.0 does not support DirectX 9. It only supports 8.1, and about even with VMWare Fusion's support of it. I've had some stuff work better in P3 and some stuff work better in Fusion, so it seems like P3 doesn't have any notable advantage here.

Personally, I'm more inclined toward Fusion, as Parallels 3.0 was a marketing disaster. They conned a bunch of people into expecting good 3D support and paying $40 to pre-order, and didn't release the actual information (DX8.1, OGL2, DX games barely work or don't work at all in most cases) until it was too late to pre-order. VMWare hasn't promised anything, to my knowledge, that it hasn't delivered, and if this pricing is true, people will really have to think about which one they want to buy.

Posted Monday 11th June 2007 20:27 GMT

Chris