For Mac users who need to run windows (who am I to judge? :-P) VMWare Fusion 4 is out, with Lion support. Usually US$79 but they're offering an introductory price of US$49.99 - and extra 20% off with code FUSION20.
Won't discuss the pros and cons between this or Parallels, but the way I see it this deal makes it much cheaper than Parallels (even the Student edition, which is $60).
Nice price for Vmware.
Also note there is also VirtualBox which is a free virtual machine, not sure about support for Lion though.
Use virtualbox on Lion daily for work without any issues.
Don't know why people would pay for this kind of software!?!
I've got no complaints with Parallels 6 but A$39.80 after discount is less than the cost of updating to Lion friendly Parallels 7… Intrigued by the performance increase claims though.
Just for those interested, I haven't tested Fusion 4 yet, but Parellels 7 has improved gaming quite significantly since v6. An example is me being able to play Dirt3 via my boot camp partition in Parallels 7 quite comfortably on my iMac, giving it 4GB RAM, 2 cores, and 1GB GFX. Can't vouch for Fusion, but it's nice not havint to reboot into Windows for the few games I can't Cider or play natively :) Now if Dead Island would just work…
Good deal though, for $50. Can anyone confirm Fusion 4 improvements for gaming since v3?
Note that Parallels are offering v7 to owners of VMWare 3 for about $30. As someone in that boat, I'm tossing up between VMWare for $40, or Paralells for $30…
Yup same here, shame there aren't any reviews out yet…
yeah im waiting on the macworld reviews which they promised would come soon!
A little off topic, but Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac Student is $50AUD through Next Byte; http://cl.ly/133u3X281S131F3g1H21
Thanks for posting this, I was happy on Fusion 3 but for $40 it's a good time to upgrade and I'd like to test this claimed 250% increase in 3D performance. Tempted by the Parallels offer but Fusion does the job, I can't see the difference being significant enough to make the switch.
I've used Virtualbox and vmware fusion.
Both seem to cause me some issues with beach balls when they're running - not sure why.
Vmware can be configured to to take a snapshot of your running windows machine automatically every hour and retain the last X hourly's/Y daily's/Z weekly's.
That can save you a lot more than the asking price.
I just tried this now (19/10) and the coupon worked for some reason! Got it for 39.80AUD which is great as there is no currency conversion fees as the price is in aussie dollars!!
I havent use it with lion yet, but I used to have a win7 bootcamp partition before changing to a SSD in my MBP, It was a real boon being able to run winblows apps without rebooting into bootcamp.